We now come to two birds mentioned in the same line of the third Georgic. The poet is telling the farmer to water his flocks in the cool evening of a hot day:
Cum frigidus aera vesper
Temperat, et saltus reficit jam roscida luna,
Litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi.[75]
The first of these birds is also mentioned in a line of the first Georgic, which is mainly taken from Aratus; but it is significant that Aratus does not mention the ‘alcyon’ either here or anywhere else.
Non tepidum ad solem pennas in littore pandunt
Dilectae Thetidi alcyones.[76]
That the ‘alcyon’ of these two passages is to be identified with our Kingfisher, which is still an Italian bird, and the only one of its kind, I can have no reasonable doubt; for Pliny’s description of the bird is too exact to be mistaken. “It is,” he says, “a little larger than a sparrow, of a blue-green colour (colore cyaneo), red in the under parts, having some white feathers close to its neck, and a long thin bill.” This description, it is true, is copied almost word for word from Aristotle, the only exception being the allusion to the white feathers on the side of the neck, which are a well-known feature in the Kingfisher.[77] Whether both were thinking of the same bird it is impossible to decide; but that Pliny was describing our Kingfisher, and believed Aristotle to have done so in the passage he copied, it is almost unreasonable to doubt.
It is, however, an open question whether the bird ordinarily known to the Greeks as ἀλκυὼν is to be identified with the Kingfisher. The greatest living authority on the birds of the Levant, Canon Tristram of Durham, tells me that he has convinced himself that it is not the Kingfisher, but the Tern or Sea-swallow: a rare coin of Eretria led him to this conclusion, on which a Tern is figured, sitting on the back of a cow.[78] And it must be allowed that the Greeks seem to have thought of their ἀλκυὼν as a sea bird no less than as a river bird. Aristotle remarks that it goes up rivers, but he seems to have thought of it mainly as a sea bird, and a well-known passage in the seventh Idyll of Theocritus appears to bear him out. But I am not here specially concerned with Greek ornithology, and what Virgil says of the alcyon piping and pluming himself on the shore is perfectly consistent with the habits of the bird. I have myself seen it on the coast of Dorset, “pennas in littore pandens,” and taking flight over a bay full half a mile in width. A greater difficulty lies in the alleged vocal powers of the bird; they sing, Pliny tells us, in the reeds, and Virgil’s alcyon makes the shore echo with his voice. The Kingfisher, so far as I know, is a silent bird except when disturbed; he will then utter a shrill pipe as he flies away. But I am quite at a loss to explain his singing, except by supposing that this was one of several curious delusions that had gathered round a curious bird.[79]
The other bird mentioned in the lines last quoted is, and perhaps will remain, a puzzle. Mr. Rhoades makes it the Goldfinch, following the commentators, who themselves follow an old tradition which will not bear criticism, and in favour of which I can find nothing more convincing than the argument that acantha[80] means in Greek a thorny or prickly tree, while the Goldfinch’s favourite food is the seed of the thistle. Let us notice, however, first, that it is not the way of the Goldfinch to sit in a thicket and sing, as Virgil describes the Acalanthis; it is a restless, lively, aërial bird, fond of singing on the wing, and by no means disposed to lurk under cover; and secondly, that the word ἄκανθα does not necessarily mean a thistle, but is equally applied to all kinds of thorny trees and shrubs,[81] such as the dumi in which Virgil makes the voice of the bird resound.