Where the forest murmurs

by William Sharp

But before rain the persistent cry of the corncrake becomes loud, raucous, with a rasping intensity. The bird is commonly said to be a ventriloquist, but this I greatly doubt. I have watched the rail in many places, often within a few yards, more than once from the flat summit of a huge boulder set in the heart of a hillmeadow of grass and sorrel. Not once have I heard ‘the King of the quails’ unmistakably throw his voice a few score of yards away. Often a crek-crāke has resounded, and at some distance away, just as I have seen the stooping body of the dreaun (or traon or treun-ri-treun) slide through the grassy tangle almost at my feet: but the cry was not identical with that which a moment before I had heard, and surely it was not only distance but the difference of sex and the pulse of love which softened it to a musical call. Once, however, watching unseen from the boulder I have spoken of, I saw and heard a landrail utter its crake in three ways, first and for over a minute with its head to one side while it moved jerkingly this way and that, then for a few seconds (perhaps four or five times) with its head apparently thrown back, and then after a minute or two’s silence and after a brief rapid run forward with out-thrust neck and lowered head, as though calling along the ground. In no instance was the call thrown as though from a distance, but unmistakably from where the bird moved or crouched. There had been no response to the first, a single echo-like crek-crāke followed the second, but to the third there came almost simultaneously calls from at least three separate regions.

Nor is the rail so invariably shy, so heedful of cover, as commonly averred. With silence and patience it may often be discerned before the seeding grass is too dense or the corn high. In a lonely place on the east shore of West Loch Tarbert in Cantire I have seen several corncrakes leave cover as fearlessly as those two other ‘sacred’ or ‘blessed’ birds, the lark and the red grouse, will leave the shelter of heather-clutch or grassy tussock: and one morning I was awaked at dawn by so near and insistent an iterance of the singular call that I rose and looked out, to discover three corncrakes awkwardly perched on a low rabbit-fence, while I counted four others running to and fro in the rough dew-glistered grass just beyond. Here, by the way, a crofter spoke of the landrail as the cearrsach, a name I have not elsewhere heard and am not sure of the meaning, unless it is ‘the lumpy’ or ‘awkward one’; while an English factor knew it as the grass-drake or meadow-drake, and again as the night-crow—the latter obviously a survival from the Anglo-Saxon ‘myghte-crake’ or a name re-given from like association of ideas. The same shrewd farmer quite believed that a corncrake is governor and leader of each flock of quails, at any rate in the season of migration—an idea held by the Greeks of old and retained by the Greek and Sicilian quail-shooters of to-day, and obviously widespread, as the Germans call the landrail the quail-king (Wachtelkonig), the French ‘le roi des cailles,’ the Italians ‘il re di quaglie,’ and the Spaniards ‘el rey de las cordonices.’ However, if he had been a Gael he could have spoken of the quail only by hearsay most likely, for it is very rare in the Highlands, and for myself I have never seen one there. Its name (garra-gart or gartan) is not unique; and the common term muir-eun is solely biblical, ‘sea-bird’ or ‘bird-from-oversea,’ because of the allusion in Numbers xii. 31.

But the dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.

AT THE RISING OF THE MOON

‘The dew is heavy on the grass: the corncrake calls: on a cloudy juniper the nightjar churrs: the fhionna or white moth wavers above the tall spires of the foxglove. The midsummer eve is now a grey-violet dusk. At the rising of the moon a sigh comes from the earth. Down the moist velvety ledges of the dark a few far-apart and low-set stars pulsate as though about to fall, but continuously regather their tremulous white rays. The night of summer is come.’

With these words I ended my preceding article, ‘The Coming of Dusk.’ There was not space there to speak of other, of so many of those nocturnal things which add so much to the mystery and spell of the short nights of summer: the arrowy throw of the bat, a shadowy javelin flung by a shadowy hand against a shadowy foe; the nightjar, the dusky clans of the owl, moonrise at sea or among pinewoods, the dance of the moths round certain trees, the faint woven cadence of the wheeling gnat-columns, the sudden scream of the heron or the wailing of seafowl, or the mournful noise of the moon-restless lapwing, wind in the grass, wind in the hollows of woods, wind among the high corries of the hills. These and a hundred other sounds and sights fill the summer-darkness: the hill-fox barking at the moonshine, the heather-cock in defiance of alarm, deer panting among the bracken, the splash of herring or mackerel on the moonlit breast of the bay, dogs baying a long way off and from farmstead to farmstead. One could not speak of all these things, or of the hundred more. In the meadows, in woods, on upland pastures, from beech-thicket to pine-forest, on the moors, on the hills, in the long valleys and the narrow glens, among the dunes and sea-banks and along wave-loud or wave-whispering shores, everywhere the midsummer-night is filled with sound, with fragrance, with a myriad motion. It is an exquisite unrest: a prolonged suspense, to the dayworn as silence is, yet is not silence, though the illusion is wrought out of the multitudinous silences which incalculably intersperse the continuous chant of death, the ceaseless hymn of life.

Everywhere, but far north in particular, the summer night has a loveliness to which the least sensitive must in some degree yield, creates a spell which must trouble even a dulled imagination, as moonlight and the faintest rippling breath will trouble unquickened pools into a sudden beauty. It is a matter of temperament, of mood and circumstance rather, where one would find oneself, at the rising of the moon, in the prolonged twilights of summer. To be in a pinewood shelving to a calm sea breaking in continuous foam: or among mountain solitudes, where all is a velvety twilight deepening to a green darkness, till the sudden moon rests athwart one hill-shoulder like a bronze shield, and then slowly is lifted and dissolves into an amber glow along all the heights: or on great moors, where one can see for leagues upon leagues, and hear nothing but the restless crying of the curlew, the screech of a heron, the abrupt unknown cries and fugitive sounds and momentary stealthy rustlings of nocturnal solitudes. Or, again, on a white roadway passing through beech-woods: or on a gorse-set common, with the churring of a nightjar filling the dusk with the unknown surge and beat in one’s own heart: or on the skirts of thatched hamlets, where a few lights linger, with perhaps the loud breathing and trampling of cattle: or in a cottage-garden, with mignonette and cabbage-roses and ghostly phlox, or dew-fragrant with musk and southernwood: or in an old manor-garden, with white array of lilies that seem to have drunk moonlight, and damask and tea-rose in odorous profusion, with the honey-loving moths circling from moss-rose to moss-rose, and the night-air delaying among tall thickets of sweet-pea. Or, it may be, on quiet sea-waters, along phantom cliffs, or under mossed and brackened rocky wastes: or on a river, under sweeping boughs of alder and willow, the great ash, the shadowy beech. But each can dream for himself. Memory and the imagination will create dream-pictures without end.

Of all these midsummer-night creatures alluded to here or in the preceding article there may be none more allied to poetic association than the nightjar, but surely there is none more interesting than the owl itself, that true bird of the darkness. That phantom-flight, that silent passage as from the unseen to the unseen, that singular cry, whether a boding scream or a long melancholy hoot or a prolonged too-whoo, how blent they are with one’s associations of the warm husht nights of summer. But is not the nightjar also of the same tribe? Fern-owl is a common name; also jar-owl, heather-owl. I have heard it called the heather-bleat, though probably that name commonly indicates the snipe. How well I remember from childhood that puzzling riddle

“The bat, the bee, the butterflee, the cuckoo and the gowk,
The heather-bleat, the mire-snipe; how many birds is that?”

I was never ‘taken-in’ by the first three, but as I had been told or had somehow discovered that the cuckoo was often companioned by the meadow-pipit I thought the latter must be the ‘gowk.’ So I guessed ‘four,’ taking the heather-bleat to be the nightjar: and it was long before I discovered that the answer was two, for only the cuckoo and the snipe were really named.