Candida venit avis longis invisa colubris.[62]
Doubtless the bird arrived in great numbers in spring on the Mantuan marshes, and found abundance of food there in the way of frogs and snakes. Its snake-eating propensity was considered so valuable in Thessaly, that the bird was preserved there by law, says Aristotle.[63] But did it remain to breed in Italy? It is remarkable that both Aristotle and Pliny have very little to say of its habits, and hardly anything as to its breeding; and if the Stork had been a bird familiar to them, they could hardly have failed to give it a prominent place in their books. At the present time it seems to pass over Italy and Greece on its passage northwards, never staying to breed in the former country and rarely in the latter; yet this can hardly be owing to temperature, as it breeds freely in the parallel latitudes of Spain and Asia Minor.
As regards ancient Italy, however, the question seems to be set at rest by a very curious passage from the Satyricon of Petronius, which has been kindly pointed out to me by Mr. Robinson Ellis. It is remarkable not only for its Latin, but for its concise and admirable description of the characteristic ways of the Stork:—
Ciconia etiam grata, peregrina, hospita,
Pietaticultrix, gracilipes, crotalistria,
Avis exsul hiemis, titulus tepidi temporis,
Nequitiae nidum in cacabo fecit meo.[64]
“A Stork too, that welcome guest from foreign lands, that devotee of filial duty, with its long thin legs and rattling bill, the bird that is banished by the winter and announces the coming of the warm season, has made his accursed nest in my boiler.” I am reminded also of a story, which has the authority both of Jornandes and Procopius, that at the siege of Aquileia in A.D. 452, Attila was encouraged to persist by the sight of a Stork and her young leaving the beleaguered city. “Such a domestic bird would never have abandoned her ancient seats unless those towers had been devoted to impending ruin and solitude.”[65] Here then we seem to have another example of a bird abandoning its ancient practice of breeding, occasionally at least, in Italy. If this is due to persecution, the persecutors have made a great mistake. The Stork does no harm to man, but rather rids his fields of vermin; the Crane, which belongs to a different order of birds, may do serious damage, as we have seen, to cultivated land, like the ‘improbus anser,’ and other birds which Virgil in the first Georgic instructs the husbandman to catch with lime or net, or to frighten away from the fields.[66]
Let us now turn to the big black birds of the race of the Crows, which are always so difficult to distinguish from one another: for the Roman savant not less difficult than for our own unlearned. There are to be found in Italy at the present day the Raven, the Crow, the Rook, the Jackdaw, the Chough, and the Alpine Chough; all of these seem to be fairly common and resident in one or other part of the country, except our familiar friends the Crow and the Rook, the former of which is very rare, and the latter hardly more than a bird of passage. We cannot of course expect to find these accurately distinguished by the ancient Italians; and there is in fact still some uncertainty as to the identification of certain birds of this kind mentioned by Virgil.
The two commonest of these are the corvus and the cornix—words which undoubtedly represent two different species. The Roman augurs, who were always busily engaged in observing birds (and it were to be wished that they had observed them to some better purpose), clearly distinguished corvus and cornix.[67] So also did Pliny,[68] in the following curious passage: “The corvus lays its eggs before midsummer, and is then in bad condition for sixty days, up to the ripening of the figs in autumn: but the cornix begins to be disordered after that time.” Virgil also uses the words for two distinct species; his cornix is solitary—