Now it is a fact almost universally recognized by modern ornithologists that our domestic pigeon is in all its varieties descended from the wild Rock-dove; and thus when we find that the Romans used columba to denote their domestic bird, and also a wild bird which made its nest in rocks, the conclusion is almost certain that by that word we are to understand our Blue-rock pigeon (Columba livia); and if this is so, by palumbes must be meant one of the other two Italian pigeons, the Wood-pigeon (Columba palumbus, Linn.) or the Stock-dove (Columba aenas, Linn.). Both species, as I have said, are now birds of passage in Italy, while the Blue-rock is resident; and Pliny tells us of the palumbes that it arrived every year in great numbers from the sea—he does not say at what season. Perhaps the Stock-dove[56] is the more likely of the two to have been the bird generally meant by palumbes; but it is quite possible that, like the unskilled of the present day, the Romans confounded the two species, and wrote of them as one.
But there is still a difficulty. The palumbes in the time of Virgil and Pliny seems to have bred in Italy; Pliny knew all about their breeding (x. 147 and 153), and Virgil makes Damoetas mark the place where their nesting is going on. But it is now very rarely, if we may trust Italian naturalists, that either Ring-dove or Stock-dove passes a summer in Italy. Birds seek a cool climate for their breeding-places; probably because in very hot countries the food suitable to their nestlings will not be found in the breeding-season. Has the climate of Italy become hotter in the last two thousand years, discouraging these birds from lingering south of the Alps?
This is an old question which has been well thrashed out by the learned, and the general conclusion seems to be in the affirmative. The last eminent writer on the subject takes this view,[57] and his argument would receive a decided clinch if it could be proved that certain kinds of birds, which formerly bred in the country, do so no longer, and that this is not due to other causes, such as the well-known passion of the Italians for killing and eating all the birds on which they can lay their hands.
If we now turn to the first Georgic, in which, following the Greek poet Aratus with freedom and discretion, Virgil has told us more of animal life than in all the rest of his poems, we find frequent mention of the long-legged and long-billed birds with which he must have been very familiar in his boyhood at Mantua. The first of these we meet with is the Crane (Latin grus). About the meaning of the word grus there can be no doubt; it would seem that the Crane was a bird accurately distinguished by the forefathers of our modern Aryan peoples even before they separated from each other. The Greek word γέρανος, the Latin grus, the German Kranich, and the Welsh garan are all identical, and point to a period when the bird was known by the same name to the whole race. Probably it was much more abundant both in Europe and Asia, at a time when the face of the country was covered by vast tracts of swamp and forest. Even now, at the period of migration, they swarm in the East; “the whooping and trumpeting of the crane,” says a great authority (Canon Tristram), “rings through the night air in spring, and the vast flocks we noticed passing north near Beersheba were a wonderful sight.”
Virgil mentions the Crane in two passages as doing damage to the crops: and this is fully borne out by modern accounts from Asia Minor and Scinde, quoted by Mr. Dresser in his Birds of Europe. The poet says of them (Georgic i. 118)—
Nec tamen haec cum sint hominumque boumque labores
Versando terram experti, nihil improbus anser
Strymoniaeque grues et amaris intuba fibris
Officiunt aut umbra nocet.[58]
And in line 307 of the same book he tells the husbandman that the winter is the time to catch them:—