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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
In "Birds of the Wave and Woodland," Phil Robinson intricately weaves together poetic prose and scientific observation to create a vivid tapestry of avian life. This meticulously researched work explores the avifauna inhabiting both coastal and forested ecosystems, revealing the intimate connections between birds and their environments. Robinson'Äôs lyrical style evokes a sense of wonder, inviting readers into the vibrant worlds of each species, while his astute analytical insights provide a solid grounding in ornithological knowledge. The book is situated within the broader literary context of nature writing, effectively blending artistic expression with scientific rigor. Phil Robinson, drawing upon his extensive background as both a writer and ornithologist, brings a wealth of personal and professional experience to this distinguished work. His passion for birds, nurtured by years of field study and observation, resonates throughout the pages, fostering a deep appreciation for the rich diversity of avian life. Robinson'Äôs previous works have established him as a prominent voice in nature literature, advocating for ecological awareness and conservation. "Birds of the Wave and Woodland" is highly recommended for nature enthusiasts, birdwatchers, and anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of the natural world. Through Robinson'Äôs engaging narrative and insightful analysis, readers will not only gain a profound appreciation for the beauty of birds but also an awareness of the ecological challenges they face. This book is an essential addition to any nature lover's library.
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Birds of the wave and woodland
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
The Birds of the Seasons—Some Birds of Passage—The Miracle of Migration—The Thrush—The Blackbird—What is the meaning of Singing?—The Swallow
CHAPTER I
IF we had to distribute the Seasons among the birds that are called “British,” selecting a notable fowl to represent each, we could hardly overlook the claims of the cuckoo, the nightingale, and the swallow to distinction. But, after all, these are not “thorough Britons.” They only come to us for our summer, and when that goes they follow it. Though great numbers of them are British-born, they are at best only Anglo-Continental, Anglo-Asiatic, Anglo-African, and Inter-Oceanic. But our resourceful little islands give us native birds, all our own, that amply serve the Seasons, and represent, with sufficing charm, the changing Four. We have the thrush, the blackbird, the skylark, and the robin, four of the sweetest birds that the round world can show—
The thrush is pre-eminently our bird of spring. While the snow-drops, the “Fair Maids of February,” are still in early bloom, and before the crocus has lit its points of flame or the primrose its pale fires, and while “the daffodils that come before the swallow dares” are scarcely in their bud, the thrush has burst forth in full song, its burden the “news of buds and blossoming.” There is little that is green yet in copse and hedge: few flowers worth a child’s picking are to be seen. But he is too full of his glad evangel to be able to keep from singing, and from the tufted larch
Some naturalists want us to call it a migrant, and in proof of their argument, tell us of the multitudes that pass over Heligoland at a certain time of the year. But against this, let every one who has a garden where thrushes build, bear witness how, in the hardest winters, the dead birds are picked up among the laurels, starved or frozen to death. This alone demolishes the migrant theory. That numbers do leave England in winter may be true enough; it is the overflow of population.
Indeed, if the superfluous songsters did not go away (and the Wild Birds’ Protection Act remained in force), we should be smothered with thrushes. I know, for instance, of a little “place” in the country, some thirty acres all told, garden, shrubberies, orchards, spinneys, and meadow, where birds are tempted to come by the planting of fruit bushes and strawberry-beds in all directions, by the numbers of elder trees and mountain ash set out, by the encouragement of blackberries and dog-roses wherever they can be allowed to grow, and where birds are tempted to stay in winter by liberal scatterings of grain-foods and table-scraps. Within this little estate there were one year forty nests of thrush and blackbird. Now supposing these birds bred only once in the year, which is very improbable, and reared only three birds apiece, which is equally so, and that half were killed or died during the year, there would then be left twice as many thrushes as in the year before. Forty pairs would become eighty; eighty, a hundred and sixty; a hundred and sixty, three hundred and twenty, and so on till five years later there would be over ten thousand pairs of thrushes (allowing all along for the same excessive proportion of casualties), breeding on thirty acres, and if each pair hatched five birds, there would be fifty thousand thrushes all together!
So it is well that thoughtful Nature leads off vast colonies every year. Those that happen to stop to rest on Heligoland stop there for good and all, for the Heligolanders eat them. Those that get farther fare no better, for everybody eats them. Belgian and Dutchman, Frenchman, Spaniard and Portuguese, German, Swiss, Italian. And it is really a
mercy that they do. For if all the thrushes that leave us were to come back again, the consequences would be simply disastrous. Suppose all the human emigrants from Great Britain were to come back again! The population of these islands would be sitting three deep on top of one another.
No, the thrush is not a migrant in the sense that the nightingale is or the turtle-dove. By a wise dispensation of Nature the superfluous increment is drafted off annually. But the same number that sing in the garden in March sing every month in the year till March comes round again.
There is, I confess it, something very pleasing in the thought that a particular turtle-dove, all the time that it was enjoying itself in the palm-gardens by Cairo, or among the arbutus and olives of Athens, should keep in its memory a particular tree in my garden in England, and in spite of all temptations should come straight back to it every summer. For such fidelity I am cordially grateful, and I appreciate the dainty little bird’s soft purring in the copse all the better for its pretty compliment of remembrance.
So with the nightingale, that, out of all the whole world, prefers an old juniper near my house to nest in, and that sits and sings gloriously every night as if in requital of my hospitality. I am proud of the small brown bird’s preference for my garden over others, and proud of my neighbour’s envy, whose garden the nightingale—“dear angel of the Spring,” “the dearling of the somer’s pryde”—never visits. And I take care that the rites shall not be violated; that my guests shall never have cause to regret their choice.
But they cannot stay with us. They come when our daffodils are all abloom, and go when the roses are fading. It is a far cry from London to Magdala, but the nightingale goes away even farther than that, and then in the Spring it turns northward again, and, by-and-by, with myriads of other birds, comes back to us to find the lilacs in flower, and the home-staying thrush with young ones already in the nest.
And they come in strange company. Sometimes the wild swan, quite an island for the little birds, flies winnowing the air beside them; sometimes a flight of hawks, but with their minds too full of their journey to think of harming their small fellow-voyagers; always with the sound of a multitude about them, and the murmuring of innumerable wings. Pitch dark the night, but somewhere or another is a leader, and they follow, wild duck and swallow, sea-fowl and dove, broad-winged geese and tiny gold-crest wrens, an instinct-driven mob that, in spite of all perils of storm and of distance, keeps its course, with dogged courage, and steers straight for the land that is to be its summer home. Lighthouses have become our best observatories for these annual transits, and the descriptions that are given of the mobbing of the great sea-lanterns by the hurrying flights of strangely assorted birds, are so curious as to be scarcely credible. What they suppose it to be, this bright revolving light in the dark waste, we cannot of course tell; but they have learned by experience that it means that land is very near, and so they all swerve in their course to pass through its rays. And those who keep the lighthouses tell us of the streams of birds that pass, flashing white for an instant in the glare of the lamp and then disappearing, and of still larger companies that fly overhead and out of sight, filling the night-air with the sound of rushing wings and the clamour of different voices, “feeling for each other in the dark,” as Bunyan says, “with words.”
I had been telling a child about the miracle of migration, and when I had finished, she routed all my science by the simplest of questions, and utterly posed me by asking: “What do they do it for?” Yes, indeed, what do they do it for? or what do they do it for? It does not matter which word we put the emphasis on: it is the same conundrum always from a slightly different angle; only another turn in the maze. As the child got no reply, she helped herself to one, and satisfactorily remarked: “Perhaps they’ve got to.” She had gathered from my description that there could be nothing agreeable to the birds in the migration, and, logically enough, since one only does that which is disagreeable from necessity, she inferred compulsion. But she set me thinking, and since science attempts no explanation of this appalling Kismet of the birds, I tried to find a reason for it for myself. And there can only be this, that it is one of Nature’s methods for reducing numbers.
At any rate, wherever we turn our eyes in Nature, we find her bringing forth in vast excess of her requirements, and then restoring the equilibrium by the institution of active scourges, or terrific epidemics of suicide. There is no need for the birds to cross seas: to travel twice a year from the Hebrides to Abyssinia. Do they want a warmer climate? do they want a cooler? They have only to remain where they are and change their altitude. Do they need food? The idea is preposterous. They leave their various countries at seasons when their food is most abundant; they are then well fed, and are then strongest for the terrific ordeal before them. Besides, imagine a bird in, say Egypt, coming to England for food! No, that is the least reasonable of all explanations. And no other is much better. So we have to fall back on the child’s reason, “Perhaps they do it because they’ve got to.”
Twice in every year do they start off, these little
pilgrims, along the broad highways of massacre, walled in, as it were, with disaster on either side, running the gauntlet of ambush and open warfare all along the line. The myriads that perish before they reach us are beyond computation. But the survivors rear new broods, the gaps by death are all filled by birth, and off they go again once more, giving hostages to pitiless calamity, and strewing afresh in Autumn the tracks of Spring with countless corpses. But I did not tell the child this. She would have said the birds were “stupid,” and thought, perhaps, the less of them and the worse.
So before we had got home I told her that “perhaps” the reason why the birds all came to England to build their nests and lay their eggs here, was because they wanted their young ones to learn the best of manners and to go to the best of bird-schools. “Some of these birds come from countries where the people are called savages, because their behaviour is shocking, and they have no schools, and so (perhaps) the birds come here because they want the little ones to be nicely brought up.”
It is not much of a reason, I confess. It will not probably satisfy Professor Ptthmllnsprts. But it satisfied my small companion, for she approved the conduct of the old birds. And when you can satisfy a child on a point that you can not satisfy a grown-up person on, you have got some way, depend upon it, towards the truth. There must be some advantage in the migration of birds, or it would not happen with such pitiless regularity. But it does not look as if the advantage were on the side of the birds.
And now to get back to my thrush. When this bird was first identified with both throstle and “mavis” is a pretty point that some bird-lover might care to follow out. It certainly is quite of modern date, for I find Spenser making the mavis as one bird “reply” to the thrush as another; in poet-laureate Skelton’s poem the “threstill” is contrasted with the mavis—“the threstill with her warblynge, the mavis with her whistell”—and quite as explicitly in Gascoigne. Harrison, again, clearly distinguishes the two as being different birds. So that the thrush-throstle-mavis was not a single bird before, at any rate, the middle of the seventeenth century. And for myself, I should not be surprised if it were found on inquiry that the mavis was originally the blackbird, and that it is an old English word, and not a Scotch one, any more than “merle.” At any rate, this much is certain, that Chaucer’s English was “a well of English undefiled”; and he sings both of mavis and of merle as of birds that he knew. And in Chaucer’s day, Scotland was a fearsome region situated “in foreign parts,” and inhabited by a race of human beings who only differed from Irish in being worse. And Chaucer did not speak Scotch. But, as I have said, the origin of our bird-and-beast names is a very pretty subject still awaiting the philological naturalist, and when that curious person is forthcoming he ought to make his subject one of a very curious and lasting interest.
Meanwhile the thrush is with us, year in year out, singing whenever it can, and persecuting snails in the intervals. For though it is fond of worms, and dotes on the berries of the mountain-ash, it has a perfect passion for snails. If a thrush is in a bush in a garden, and you throw a snail on to the garden path close by it, the thrush is promptly out. The sound of the shell on the gravel attracts it at once, for it is familiar with it. In winter, when the snails have all cuddled up together in some corner behind the flower-pots, or between the pear-tree stem and the wall, the thrush finds them out, and so long as a snail remains the thrush will stop. Nor is it a shy bird when thus engaged, for if you come suddenly upon it, walking quietly on the snow, it will hop off with its victim a little way and begin again tapping the poor snail upon a stone, till the little householder is left without a wall to protect it, and is swallowed. And if a thrush finds a secluded corner with a convenient stone there, it always takes its snails to the same spot, building up in its own way a little shell-midden, like those which prehistoric man has left us, of oyster-shells and clams, to puzzle over. When driven by stress of weather to the seashore, it treats the hard-shelled whelks just as it treated the garden-snails, and by persistent rapping on the rocks, arrives at its food.
By nest, and, above all, by song, this bird is probably
“In days of pinching want”
the best known of all our birds. The blackbird is quite as familiar by sight and by song, but many who know what the mavis’ eggs and nests are like, would perhaps be puzzled to describe the merle’s. The home of the hedge-sparrow, again, is well known, and, after a fashion, its appearance; but how many who hear it singing know who the small musician is? So, taken all round, the thrush is the bird we are most intimate with. And how welcome it always is on the lawn, with its charming plumage, and its pretty, half-timid way of coming out into public! “I hope I am not in the way?” it seems to ask, as it hops quickly out from under the shrubs, and as suddenly stops. “May I? Thanks.” And out it hops a little further, and again stops. But why describe so well-known a favourite? Tennyson has put words to its song, and the better one knows the bird’s song, the more admirable the poet’s words appear.
And the thrush sings alike, with constantly changing cadences but with always equal melody, when the wind is blowing bitterly over the tree-tops, when rain is falling, when the night is dark. In winter the poor bird, diffident of its welcome, seldom comes to the door for alms when others come in crowds. So if you have a wish to be kind to it in its days of pinching want, scatter some food farther from the house, out of sight of it, and there, if you go cautiously, you may always see the starved thrushes gratefully accepting their little dues of crumb and meat.
The blackbird is the shadow of the thrush: you seldom see or hear one without the other: nor, indeed, is either of them often mentioned alone. Yet the blackbird is probably the more commonly seen. For one thing, it is a very conspicuous bird; for another, it is not so diffident as the thrush. It is the blackbirds that you see flying out of the cherry-trees and strawberry-beds, but if you set nets for the marauders, as I did one year to stock an aviary, you catch quite as many mavises as merles. The former, it is said, are among the fruit “looking for worms,” but I doubt it. They are not so bold in their depredations as their black cousins, but I fancy they are more sly. Blackbirds will fly away with a cherry in their beaks or a strawberry without any affectation of innocence: the thrush, when startled, goes off “empty-handed.” But throw down a handful of fruit, especially raspberries, in an aviary, go aside and watch which bird is first at the feast—it is the thrush.
The blackbird and thrush are really two birds of very dissimilar character: the same traps will not succeed as well with one as with the other, nor is it so easy to rear the former as the latter. Country people declare that the mothers poison their young ones when caged, and a poet says:
Whatever foundation there may be for the belief, I found that if I caged a nest of blackbirds (leaving the cage in the bush and the top open for the parents to go in and out), the old birds would visit the nest, presumably with food, with the greatest diligence, but the young birds would be dying in two days. The thrushes kept their young ones alive.
