Birds and Man Part 6

The pair I spent so long a time in watching were greatly disturbed at my presence on the cliff. Their anxiety was not strange, seeing that their nest is annually plundered in the interest of the "cursed collector," as Sir Herbert Maxwell has taught us to name the worst enemy of the rarer British birds. The "worst," I say; but there is another almost if not quite as bad, and who in the case of some species is really worse. At intervals of from fifteen to twenty minutes they would appear overhead uttering their angry, deep croak, and, with wings outspread, seemingly without an effort on their parts allow the wind to lift them higher and higher until they would look no bigger than daws; and, after dwelling for a couple of minutes on the air at that great height, they would descend to the earth again, to disappear behind a neighbouring cliff. And on each occasion they exhibited that wonderful aerial feat, characteristic of the raven, and rare among birds, of coming down in a series of long drops with closed wings. I am inclined to think that a strong wind is necessary for the performance of this feat, enabling the bird to fall obliquely, and to arrest the fall at any moment by merely throwing out the wings. At any rate, it is a fact that I have never seen this method of descent used by the bird in calm weather. It is totally different to the tumbling down, as if wounded, of ravens when two or more are seen toying with each other in the air--a performance which is also practised by rooks and other species of the crow family. The tumbling feat is indulged in only when the birds are playing, and, as it would appear, solely for the fun of the thing; the feat I am describing has a use, as it enables the bird to come down from a great height in the air in the shortest time and with the least expenditure of force possible. With the vertical fall of a bird like the gannet on its prey we are not concerned here, but with the descent to earth of a bird soaring at a considerable height. Now, many birds when rushing rapidly down appear to close their wings, but they are never wholly closed; in some cases they are carried as when folded, but are slightly raised from the body; in other cases the wing is tightly pressed against the side, but the primaries stand out obliquely, giving the descending bird the figure of a barbed arrow-head. This may be seen in daws, choughs, pipits, and many other species. The raven suddenly closes his outspread wings, just as a man might drop his arms to his sides, and falls head downwards through the air like a stone bird cast down from its pedestal; but he falls obliquely, and, after falling for a s.p.a.ce of twenty or thirty or more feet, he throws out his wings and floats for a few seconds on the air, then falls again, and then again, until the earth is reached.

Let the reader imagine a series of invisible wires stretched, wire above wire, at a distance of thirty or forty yards apart, to a height of six or seven hundred yards from the earth. Let him next imagine an acrobat, infinitely more daring, more agile, and graceful in action than any performer he has ever seen, standing on the highest wire of all, in his black silk tights, against the blue sky, his arms outstretched; then dropping his arms to his sides and diving through the air to the next wire, then to the next, and so on successively until he comes to the earth. The feat would be similar, only on a larger scale and less beautiful than that of the ravens as I witnessed it again and again from the cliff on that windy day.

While watching this magnificent display it troubled me to think that this pair of ravens would probably not long survive to be an ornament to the coast. Their nest, it has been stated, is regularly robbed, but I had been informed that in the summer of 1894 a third bird appeared, and it was then conjectured that the pair had succeeded in rearing one of their young. About a month later a raven was picked up dead on the coast by a boatman,--killed, it was believed, by his fellow-ravens,--and since then two birds only have been seen. There are only two more pair of ravens on the Somersetshire coast, and, as one of these has made no attempt to breed of late, we may take it that the raven population of this county, where the species was formerly common, has now been reduced to two pairs.

Anxious to find out if there was any desire in the place to preserve the birds I had been observing, I made many inquiries in the neighbourhood, and was told that the landlord cared nothing about them, and that the tenant's only desire was to see the last of them. The tenant kept a large number of sheep, and always feared, one of his men told me, that the ravens would attack and kill his lambs. It was true that they had not done so as yet, but they might kill a lamb at any time; and, besides, there were the rabbits--the place swarmed with them--there was no doubt that a young rabbit was taken occasionally.

Why, then, I asked, if they were so destructive, did not his master go out and shoot them at once? The man looked grave, and answered that his master would not do the killing himself, but would be very glad to see it done by some other person.

How curious it is to find that the old superst.i.tions about the raven and the evil consequences of inflicting wilful injury on the bird still survive, in spite of the fact that the species has been persecuted almost to extirpation!

"Have you not read, sir," Don Quixote is made to say, "the annals and histories of England, wherein are renowned and famous exploits of King Arthur, of whom there goes a tradition, and a common one, all over that kingdom of Great Britain, that the king did not die, but that by magic art he was transformed into a raven, and that in process of time he shall reign again and recover his kingdom and sceptre, for which reason it cannot be proved that, from that day to this, any Englishman has killed a raven?"

Now, it is certain that many Englishmen kill ravens, also that if the country people in England ever had any knowledge of King Arthur they have long forgotten it. Nevertheless this particular superst.i.tion still exists. I have met with it in various places, and found an instance of it only the other day in the Midlands, where the raven no longer breeds. Near Broadway, in Worcestershire, there is a farm called "Kite's Nest," where a pair of ravens bred annually up to about twenty-eight or thirty years ago, when the young were taken and the nest pulled down by three young men from the village: to this day it is related by some of the old people that the three young men all shortly came to bad ends. Near Broadway an old farmer told me that since the birds had been driven away from "Kite's Nest" he had not seen a raven in that part of the country until one made its appearance on his farm about four years ago. He was out one day with his gun, cautiously approaching a rabbit warren, when the bird suddenly got up from the mouth of a burrow, and coming straight to him, hovered for some seconds above his head, not more than thirty yards from him. "It looked as if he wanted to be shot at," said the old man, "but he's no bird to be shot at by I. 'Twould be bad for I to hurt a raven, and no mistake."

Continuing my inquiries about the Somerset ravens, I found a man who was anxious that they should be spared. His real reason was that their eggs for him were golden eggs, for he lived near the cliff, and had an eye always on them, and had been successful for many years in robbing their nest, until he had at length come to look on these birds almost as his own property. Being his he loved them, and was glad to talk about them to me by the hour. Among other things he related that the ravens had for very near neighbours on the rocks a pair of peregrine falcons, and for several years there had always been peace between them. At length one winter afternoon he heard loud, angry cries, and presently two birds appeared above the cliff--a raven and a falcon--engaged in desperate battle and mounting higher and higher as they fought. The raven, he said, did not croak, but constantly uttered his harsh, powerful, barking cry, while the falcon emitted shrill, piercing cries that must have been audible two miles away. At intervals as they rose, wheeling round and round, they struck at each other, and becoming locked together fell like one bird for a considerable distance; then they would separate and mount again, shrieking and barking. At length they rose to so great a height that he feared to lose sight of them; but the struggle grew fiercer; they closed more often and fell longer distances, until they were near the earth once more, when they finally separated, flying away in opposite directions. He was afraid that the birds had fatally injured each other, but after two or three days he saw them again in their places.

It was not possible for him, he told me, to describe the feelings he had while watching the birds. It was the most wonderful thing he had ever witnessed, and while the fight lasted he looked round from time to time, straining his eyes and praying that some one would come to share the sight with him, and because no one appeared he was miserable.

I could well understand his feeling, and have not ceased to envy him his good fortune. Thinking, after leaving him, of the sublime conflict he had described, and of the raven's savage nature, Blake's question in his "Tiger, tiger, burning bright" came to my mind:

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

We can but answer that it was no other; that when the Supreme Artist had fashioned it with bold, free lines out of the blue-black rock, he smote upon it with his mallet and bade it live and speak; and its voice when it spoke was in accord with its appearance and temper--the savage, human-like croak, and the loud, angry bark, as if a deep-chested man had barked like a blood-hound.

How strange it seems, when we come to think of it, that the owners of great estates and vast parks, who are lovers of wild nature and animal life, and should therefore have been most anxious to preserve this bird, have allowed it to be extirpated! "A raven tree," says the author of the Birds of Wiltshire, "is no mean ornament to a park, and speaks of a wide domain and large timber, and an ancient family; for the raven is an aristocratic bird and cannot brook a confined property and trees of a young growth. Would that its predilection were more humoured and a secure retreat allowed it by the larger proprietors in the land!"

The wide domains, the large timber, and the ancient families survive, but the raven has vanished. It occasionally takes a young rabbit. But the human ravens of Somerset--to wit, the men and boys who have as little right to the rabbits--do the same. I do not suppose that in this way fewer than ten thousand to twenty thousand rabbits are annually "picked up," or "poached"--if any one likes that word better--in the county. Probably a larger number. The existence of a pair of ravens on an estate of twenty or thirty thousand acres would not add much to the loss. No doubt the raven kills other creatures that are preserved for sport, but it does not appear that its extermination has improved things in Somerset. Thirty years ago, when black-game was more plentiful than it is now, the raven was to be met with throughout the county, and was abundant on Exmoor and the Quantocks. The old head keeper on the Forest of Exmoor told me that when he took the place, twenty-five years ago, ravens, carrion crows, buzzards, and hawks of various kinds were very abundant, and that the war he had waged against them for a quarter of a century had well-nigh extirpated all these species. He had kept a careful record of all birds killed, noting the species in every case, as he was paid for all, but the reward varied, the largest sum being given for the largest birds--ravens and buzzards. His book shows that in one year, a quarter of a century ago, he was paid for fifty-two ravens shot and trapped. After that the number annually diminished rapidly, and for several years past not one raven had been killed.

At present one may go from end to end of the county, which is a long one, and find no raven; but in very many places, from North Devon to the borders of Gloucestershire, one would find accounts of "last ravens." Even in the comparatively populous neighbourhood of Wells at least three pairs of ravens bred annually down to about twenty years ago--one pair in the tower on Glas...o...b..ry Tor, one on the Ebor rocks, and one at Wookey Hole, two miles from the town.

But Somerset is no richer in memories of "last ravens" than most English counties. A selection of the most interesting of such memories of ravens expelled from their ancestral breeding-places during the last half-century would fill a volume. In conclusion I will give one of the raven stories I picked up in Somerset. It was related to me by Dr Livett, who has been the parish doctor in Wells for over sixty years, and was able to boast, before retiring in 1898, that he was the oldest parish doctor in the kingdom. About the year 1841 he was sent for to attend a cottage woman at Priddy--a desolate little village high up in the Mendips, four or five miles from Wells. He had to remain some hours at the cottage, and about midnight he was with the other members of the family in the living-room, when a loud tapping was heard on the glazed window. As no one in the room moved, and the tapping continued at intervals, he asked why some one did not open the door. They replied that it was only the ravens, and went on to tell him that a pair of these birds roosted every night close by, and invariably when a light was seen burning at a late hour in any cottage they would come and tap at the window. The ravens had often been seen doing it, and their habit was so well known that no notice was taken of it.

CHAPTER IX

OWLS IN A VILLAGE

In November, when tramping in the Midlands, I paid a visit to a friend who had previously informed me, in describing the attractions of the small, remote, rustic village he lived in, that it was haunted by owls.

The night-roving bird that inhabits the country village and its immediate neighbourhood is, in most cases, the white or barn owl, the owl that prefers a loft in a barn or a church tower for home and breeding-place to the hollow, ivied tree. The loft is dry and roomy, the best shelter from the storm and the tempest, although not always from the tempest of man's insensate animosity. The larger wood owl is supposed to have a different disposition, to be a dweller in deep woods, in love with "seclusion, gloom, and retirement,"--a thorough hermit. It is not so everywhere, certainly not in my friend's Gloucestershire village, where the white owl is unknown, while the brown or wood owl is quite common. But it is not a thickly wooded district; the woods there are small and widely separated. There is, however, a deal of old hedgerow timber and many large trees scattered about the fields. These the owl inhabits and is abundant simply because the gamekeeper is not there with his everlasting gun; while the farmers look on the bird rather as a friend than an enemy.

To go a little further into the matter, there are no gamekeepers because the landowners cannot afford the expensive luxury of hand-reared pheasants. The country is, or was, a rich one; but the soil is clay so extraordinarily stiff that four or five horses are needed to draw a plough. It is, indeed, strange to see five huge horses, all in line, dragging a plough, and moving so slowly that, when looked at from a distance, they appear not to move at all. If here and there a little wheat is still grown, it is only because, as the farmers say, "We mun have straw." The land has mostly gone out of cultivation, many vacant farms could be had at about five shillings an acre, and the landlords would in many cases, when pay day came round, be glad to take half a crown and forgive the rest.

The fields that were once ploughed are used for grazing, but the sheep and cattle on them are very few; one can only suppose that the land is not suitable for grazing purposes, or else that the farmers are too poor to buy sufficient stock.

Viewed from some eminence, the wide, green country appears a veritable waste; the idle hedges enclosing vacant fields, the ancient scattered trees, the absence of life, the noonday quiet, where the silence is only broken at intervals by some distant bird voice, strangely impress the mind as by a vision of a time to come and of an England dispeopled. It is restful; there is a melancholy charm in it similar to that of a nature untouched by man, although not so strong. Here, everywhere are visible the marks of human toil and ownership--the wave-like, parallel ridges in the fields, now mantled with gra.s.s, and the hedges that cut up the surface of the earth into innumerable segments of various shapes and sizes. It is not wild, but there is something in it of the desolaton that accompanies wildness--a promise soon to be fulfilled, now that gra.s.s and herbage will have freedom to grow, and the hedges that have been trimmed for a thousand years will no longer be restrained from spreading.

In this district the farmhouses and cottages are not scattered over the country. The farm-buildings, as a rule, form part of the village; the villages are small and mostly hidden from sight among embowering trees or in a coombe. From the high ground in some places it is possible to gaze over many miles of surrounding country and not see a human habitation; hours may sometimes be pa.s.sed in such a spot without a human figure appearing in the landscape.

The village I was staying at is called Willersey; the nearest to it, a little over a mile away, is Saintbury. This last was just such a pretty peaceful spot as would tempt a world-weary man to exclaim on first catching sight of it, "Here I could wish to end my days." A little old-world village, set among trees in the sheltering hollow of a deep coombe, consisting of thatched stone cottages, grouped in a pretty disorder; a modest ale-house; a parsonage overgrown with ivy; and the old stone church, stained yellow and grey with lichen, its low square tower overtopped by the surrounding trees. It was a pleasure merely to sit idle, thinking of nothing, on the higher part of the green slope, with that small centre of rustic life at my feet. For many hours of each day it was strangely silent, the hours during which the men were away at a distance in the fields, the children shut up in school, and the women in their cottages. An occasional bird voice alone broke the silence--the distant harsh call of a crow, or the sudden startled note of a magpie close at hand, a sound that resembles the broken or tremulous bleat of a goat. If an apple dropped from a tree in the village, its thud would be audible from end to end of the little crooked street in every cottage it would be known that an apple had dropped. On some days the sound of the threshing-machine would be heard a mile or two away; in that still atmosphere it was like the prolonged hum of some large fly magnified a million times. A musical sound, buzzing or clear, at times tremulous, rising or falling at intervals, it would swell and fill the world, then grow faint and die away. This is one of the artificial sounds which, like distant chimes, harmonise with rural scenes.

Towards evening the children were all at play, their shrill cries and laughter sounding from all parts of the village. Then, when the sun had set and the landscape grew dim, they would begin to call to one another from all sides in imitation of the wood owl's hoot. During these autumn evenings the children at this spot appeared to drop naturally into the owl's note, just as in spring in all parts of England they take to mimicking the cuckoo's call. Children are like birds of a social and loquacious disposition in their fondness for a set call, a penetrative cry or note, by means of which they can converse at long distances. But they have no settled call of their own, no cry as distinctive as that of one of the lower animals. They mimic some natural sound. In the case of the children of these Midland villages it is the wood owl's clear prolonged note; and in every place where some animal with a striking and imitable voice is found its call is used by them. Where no such sound is heard, as in large towns, they invent a call; that is, one invents it and the others immediately take it up. It is curious that the human species, in spite of its long wild life in the past, should have no distinctive call, or calls, universally understood. Among savage tribes the men often mimic the cry of some wild animal as a call, just as our children do that of an owl by night, and of some diurnal species in the daytime. Other tribes have a call of their own, a shout or yell peculiar to the tribe; but it is not used instinctively--it is a mere symbol, and is artificial, like the long-drawn piercing coo-ee of the Australian colonists in the bush, and the abrupt Hi! with which we hail a cab, with other forms of halooing; or even the lupine gurgled yowl of the morning milkman.

After dark the silence at the village was very profound until about half-past nine to ten o'clock, when the real owls, so easily to be distinguished from their human mockers, would begin their hooting--a single, long, uninflected note, and after it a silent interval of eight or ten seconds; then the succeeding longer, much more beautiful note, quavering at first, but growing steady and clear, with some slight modulation in it. The symbols hoo-hoo and to-whit to-who, as Shakespeare wrote it, stand for the wood owl's note in books; but you cannot spell the sound of an oaten straw, nor of the owl's pipe. There is no w in it, and no h and no t. It suggests some wind instrument that resembles the human voice, but a very un-English one--perhaps the high-pitched somewhat nasal voice of an Arab intoning a prayer to Allah. One cannot hit on the precise instrument, there are so many; perhaps it is obsolete, and the owl was taught his song by lovers in the long ago, who wooed at twilight in a forgotten tongue,

And gave the soft winds a voice, With instruments of unremembered forms.

No, that cannot be; for the wood owl's music is doubtless older than any instrument made by hands to be blown by human lips. Listening by night to their concert, the many notes that come from far and near, human-like, yet airy, delicate, mysterious, one could imagine that the sounds had a meaning and a message to us; that, like the fairy-folk in Mr Yeats's Celtic lyric, the singers were singing--

We who are old, old and gay, O, so old; Thousands of years, thousands of years, If all were told!

The fairies certainly have a more understandable way of putting it than the geologists and the anthropologists when we ask them to tell us how long it is since Palaeolithic man listened to the hooting of the wood owl. Has this sound the same meaning for us that it had for him--the human being that did not walk erect, and smile, and look on heaven, but went with a stoop, looking on the earth? No, and Yes.

Standing alone under the great trees in the dark still nights, the sound seems to increase the feeling of loneliness, to make the gloom deeper, the silence more profound. Turning our visions inward on such occasions, we are startled with a glimpse of the night-side of nature in the soul: we have with us strange unexpected guests, fantastic beings that are in no way related to our lives; dead and buried since childhood, they have miraculously been restored to life. When we are back in the candlelight and firelight, and when the morrow dawns, these children of night and the unsubstantial appearance of things

fade away Into the light of common day.

The villagers of Saintbury are, however, still in a somewhat primitive mental condition; the light of common day does not deliver them from the presence of phantoms, as the following instance will show.

Near Willersey there is a group of very large old elm-trees which is a favourite meeting-place of the owls, and one very dark starless night, about ten o'clock, I had been listening to them, and after they ceased hooting I remained for half an hour standing motionless in the same place. At length, in the direction of Saintbury, I heard the dull sound of heavy stumbling footsteps coming towards me over the rough, ridgy field. Nearer and nearer the man came, until, arriving at the hedge close to which I stood, he scrambled through, muttering maledictions on the thorns that scratched and tore him; then, catching sight of me at a distance of two or three yards, he started back and stood still very much astonished at seeing a motionless human figure at that spot. I greeted him, and, to explain my presence, remarked that I had been listening to the owls.

"Owls!--listening to the owls!" he exclaimed, staring at me. After a while he added, "We have been having too much of the owls over at Saintbury." Had I heard, he asked, about the young woman who had dropped down dead a week or two ago, after hearing an owl hooting near her cottage in the daytime? Well, the owl had been hooting again in the same tree, and no one knew who it was for and what to expect next.

The village was in an excited state about it, and all the children had gathered near the tree and thrown stones into it, but the owl had stubbornly refused to come out.

That about the young woman he had spoken of is a queer little story to read in this enlightened land. She was apparently in very good health, a wife, and the mother of a small child; but a few weeks before her sudden death a strange thing occurred to trouble her mind. One afternoon, when sitting alone in her cottage taking tea, she saw a cricket come in at the open door, and run straight into the middle of the room. There it remained motionless, and without stirring from her seat she took a few moist tea-leaves and threw them down near the welcome guest. The cricket moved up to the leaves, and when it touched them and appeared just about to begin sucking their moisture, to her dismay it turned aside, ran away out at the door, and disappeared. She informed all her neighbours of this startling occurrence, and sadly spoke of an aunt who was living at another village and was known to be in bad health. "It must be for her," she said; "we'll soon be hearing bad news of her, I'm thinking." But no bad news came, and when she was beginning to believe that the strange cricket that had refused to remain in the house had proved a false prophet, the warning of the owl came to startle her afresh. At noonday she heard it hooting in the great horse-chestnut overgrown with ivy that stands at the roadside, close to her cottage. The incident was discussed by the villagers with their usual solemnity and head-shakings, and now the young woman gave up all hopes of her sick aunt's recovery; for that one of her people was going to die was certain, and it could be no other than that ailing one. And, after all, the message and warning was for her and not the aunt. Not many days after the owl had hooted in broad daylight, she dropped down dead in her cottage while engaged in some domestic work.

On the following morning I went with the friend I was visiting at Willersey to Saintbury, and the story heard overnight was confirmed.

The owl had been hooting in the daytime in the same old horse-chestnut tree from which it had a short time ago foretold the young woman's death. One of the villagers, who was engaged in repairing the thatch of a cottage close to the tree, informed us that the owl's hooting had not troubled him in the least. Owls, he truly said, often hoot in the daytime during the autumn months, and he did not believe that it meant death for some one.

This sceptical fellow, it is hardly necessary to say, was a young man who had spent a good deal of his time away from the village.

At Willersey, a Mr Andrews, a lover of birds who owns a large garden and orchard in the village, gave me an entertaining account of a pet wood owl he once had. He had it as a young bird and never confined it. As a rule it spent most of the daylight hours in an apple loft, coming forth when the sun was low to fly about the grounds until it found him, when it would perch on his shoulder and spend the evening in his company. In one thing this owl differed from most pet birds which are allowed to have their liberty: he made no difference between the people of the house and those who were not of it; he would fly on to anybody's shoulder, although he only addressed his hunger-cry to those who were accustomed to feed him. As he roamed at will all over the place he became well known to every one, and on account of his beauty and perfect confidence he grew to be something of a village pet. But short days with long, dark evenings--and how dark they can be in a small, tree-shaded, lampless village!--wrought a change in the public feeling about the owl.

He was always abroad in the evening, gliding about unseen in the darkness on downy silent wings, and very suddenly dropping on to the shoulder of any person--man, woman, or child--who happened to be out of doors. Men would utter savage maledictions when they felt the demon claws suddenly clutch them; girls shrieked and fled to the nearest cottage, into which they would rush, palpitating with terror. Then there would be a laugh, for it was only the tame owl; but the same terror would be experienced on the next occasion, and young women and children were afraid to venture out after nightfall lest the ghostly creature with luminous eyes should pop down upon them.

At length, one morning the bird came not back from his night-wandering, and after two days and nights, during which he had not been seen, he was given up for lost. On the third day Mr Andrews was in his orchard, when, happening to pa.s.s near a clump of bushes, he heard the owl's note of recognition very faintly uttered. The poor bird had been in hiding at that spot the whole time, and when taken up was found to be in a very weak condition and to have one leg broken. No doubt one of the villagers on whose shoulders it had sought to alight, had struck it down with his stick and caused its injury. The bone was skilfully repaired and the bird tenderly cared for, and before long he was well again and strong as ever; but a change had come over his disposition. His confidence in his human fellow-creatures was gone; he now regarded them all--even those of the house--with suspicion, opening wide his eyes and drawing a little back when any person approached him. Never more did he alight on any person's shoulder, though his evenings were spent as before in flying about the village. Insensibly his range widened and he became wilder.

Human companionship, no longer pleasant, ceased to be necessary; and at length he found a mate who was willing to overlook his pauper past, and with her he went away to live his wild life.

CHAPTER X

THE STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL SHELDRAKE