Birds in Town & Village Part 8

What I have so far been unable to trace is the career of the young after August. We see that once they are able to fend for themselves they club together in small flocks and continue together during their "brown thrush" stage, but by and by they get the adult plumage and language and are no longer distinguishable as young. Do they, then, join the old birds before the wandering and migrating south begins? And do they pair or not before the winter?

III

VILLAGE BIRDS IN WINTER

Throughout the winter of 1915-16, and more particularly during my three months in the hospital at Hayle, from the beginning of December to March, I was greatly impressed at the perpetual state of hunger in which the birds exist, especially the three commonest species in our village--rook, daw, and starling. Little wonder that the sight of a piece of bread thrown out on the green field below my window would bring all these three and many others with a rush from all sides, every one eager to get a morsel! But the birds that live most in a groove, as it were, like the rook and starling, and have but one kind of food and one way of finding it, are always the worst off in winter. These subsist on the grubs and other minute organisms they are able to pick out of the gra.s.s roots, and are life workers paid by the piece who must labour hard and incessantly to make enough to keep themselves alive; their winter life is accordingly in startling contrast to that of the daw--one that lives on his wits and fares better and altogether has an easier and more amusing time.

It was the habit of the three species named to quit the wood where they roosted as soon as it was light enough for them to feed, the time varying according to the state of the weather from half-past eight to ten o'clock, the mornings being usually wet and dark. The rooks that had their rookery in the village numbered forty or fifty birds, and these would remain at the village, getting their food in the surrounding fields for the rest of the day. The daws would appear in a body of two or three hundred birds, but after a little while many of them would go on to their own villages further away, leaving about sixty to eighty birds belonging to the village. Last of all the starlings would appear in flocks and continuous streams of birds often fighting their way against wind and rain, leaving about a couple of hundred or more behind, these being the birds that had settled in the village for the season, and worked in the gra.s.s fields in and surrounding it. Rooks and starlings would immediately fall to work, while the daws, the flock breaking up into small parties of three or four, would distribute themselves about the village and perch on the chimney-pots. They would perch and then fly, and for all the rest of the day would be incessantly shifting about from place to place, on the look-out for something to eat, dropping from time to time to s.n.a.t.c.h up a crust of bread or the core of an apple thrown away by a child in the road, or into a back garden or on to a dust-heap where potato-parings and the head of a mackerel or other refuse had been thrown. They were very bold, but not as courageous as the old-time British kite that often swooped to s.n.a.t.c.h the bread from a child's hand.

From time to time one, or a pair, of a small party of these daws would drop down on the field before my window when the rooks and starlings were there prodding busily at the turf, but though I watched them a thousand times I never detected them trying to find something for themselves. They simply stood or walked about among the working birds, watching them intently. Grub-finding was an art they had not acquired, or were too indolent or proud to practise; but they were not too proud to beg or steal; they simply watched the other birds in the hope of being able to s.n.a.t.c.h up a big unearthed grub and run away with it. As a rule after a minute or two they would get tired of waiting and rush off with a lively shout. Back they would go to the chimney-pots and to their flying up and down, suspending their flight over this or that yard or garden, and by and by one would succeed in picking up something big, and at once all the other daws in sight would give chase to take it from him; for these village daws are not only parasites and cadgers, but worse--they are thieves without honour among themselves.

In spite of all the time and energy wasted in their perpetual races and chases going on all over the village, every bird exerting himself to the utmost to rob all he can from his pals, they get enough to eat; for when the day is over and other daws from other villages drop in to visit them, all unite in a big crowd and wheel about, making the place ring with their merry yelping cries, before sailing away to the wood. One might say after witnessing and listening to this evening performance that they have great joy in their rascally lives.

But for the poor starling there is little joy in these brief, dark, wet winter days, even if there is little frost in this West Cornwall climate. A frost of a few days' duration would be fatal to incalculable numbers, especially if, as in the great frosts of the winters of 1894-5 and 1896-7, severest in the south and west of England, it should come late in winter, I think it can be taken as a fact that a long or overseas migration takes place before midwinter or not at all. In January and February, when birds are driven to the limits of the land by a great cold they do not cross the sea, either because they are too weak to attempt such an adventure or for some other reason unknown to us. We see that on these occasions they come to the seash.o.r.e and follow it south and west even to the western extremity of Cornwall, and then either turn back inland or wait where they are for open weather, many perishing in the meantime.

During those three winter months, when I watched the starlings at work on the field before my hospital window, they appeared to be in a perpetual state of extreme hunger and were always running over the ground, rapidly prodding as they moved, and apparently finding their food almost exclusively on the surface--that is to say, on the surface of the soil but under the gra.s.s, at its surface roots. At other seasons they go deep when they know from the appearance of every blade of gra.s.s whether or not there is a grub feeding on its roots beneath the surface.

Without shooting and examining the stomachs of a large number of starlings it was not possible to know just what the food consisted of; but with my strong binocular on them I could make out that at almost every dig of the beak something was picked up, and could actually see it when the beak was held up with the minute morsel at its tip--a small, thread-like, semi-transparent worm or grub in most instances. Two or three of these atomies would hardly have made a square meal for a ladybird, and I should think that a starling after swallowing a thousand would fed very hungry. And on many days this scanty, watery food had to be searched for in very painful conditions, as it rained heavily on most days and often all day long. At such times the birds in their sodden plumage looked like drowned starlings fished out of a pool and galvanized into activity. Nor were they even seen to shake the wet off--a common action in swallows and other birds that feed in the rain; they were too hungry, too anxious to find something to eat to keep the starling soul and body together before the long night of eighteen or twenty hours would overtake them.

No doubt the winter of 1915-16 was exceptionally wet and cold, although without any severe frosts; a long frost in February, when the birds were most reduced, would probably have proved fatal to at least half their number. But though it continued wet and cold, things began to mend for the starlings towards the end of February, and in March the improvement was very marked; they were not in such a perpetual hurry; their time was longer now, and by the end of the month their working day had increased from five or six to twelve or fourteen hours, and the light had increased and grubs were easier to find. By April, the starlings no longer appeared to be the same species as the poor, rusty, bedraggled wretches we had been accustomed to see; they are now lively, happy birds with a splendid gloss on their feathers and beaks as bright a yellow as the blackbird's. Finally, in April they left us, not going in a body, but flock by flock, day after day, until by the end of the month all were gone back to their homes in the north--all but the two or three to half a dozen pairs in each village. And these few that stay behind are new colonists in West Cornwall.

IV

INCREASING BIRDS IN BRITAIN

About the daw, or Jackie, or Dorrie or Jackie-Dorrie, as he is variously and familiarly called, and his village habits, there will be more to say presently; just now my concern is with another matter--a veritable daw problem.

For the last twenty years or longer it has seemed to me that the daw is an increasing species in Britain; at all events I am quite sure that it is so in the southern half of England, particularly along the coast of Somerset, Devon, Dorset, and in Cornwall, more than in any other county.

And why is it? He is certainly not a respectable bird, like the starling, for example--if we do not go to the cherry-grower for the starling's character. He is and always has been on the keeper's and farmer's black list, and scarcely a week pa.s.ses but you will find him described in some gamekeeper's or farmer's journal as "even worse than the rook." Even the ornithologists who are interested in birds as birds haven't a good word to say of the daw. According to them he alone is responsible for the disappearance of his distinguished relation, the chough. (The vulgar daw is of course devoid of any distinction at all, unless it be his grey pate and wicked little grey eyes.)

The ornithologists were wrong about the chough, just as they had been wrong about the goldfinch, during the late years of the nineteenth century, and as they were wrong about the swallows and martins in later years. Of the goldfinch, they said, and solemnly put it down in their books, that owing to improved methods of agriculture the thistle had been extirpated and the bird, deprived of his natural food, had forsaken this country. But no sooner did our County Councils begin to avail themselves of the powers given them by the Bird Act of twenty years ago to protect the goldfinch from the bird-catcher, than it began to increase again and is still increasing, year by year, all over the country.

Of the decrease of swallows and martins, they said it resulted from the action of the sparrows in ousting them from their nests and nesting-sites. But we know the true cause of the decline of these two species, the best loved and best protected of all birds in Britain, not even excepting robin redbreast. The French Government, in response to representations on this matter from our Foreign Office, have caused enquiries to be made and have found that our swallows are being destroyed wholesale in France during the autumn migration, and have promised to put a stop to this deplorable business. They do not appear to have done so, since the promise was made three years ago, and I can say from my own observation in the south and west countries that the decline has continued and that we have never had so few swallows come to us as in the present summer of 1916.

The daw--to return to that subject--has always been regarded as an injurious species, and down to a quarter of a century ago every farm lad in possession of a gun shot it in the interests of the henwife, even as he had formerly shot the kite, a common British species and a familiar feature in the landscape down to the early years of last century.

Doubtless it was a great thing to bring down this great bird "that soars sublime" and nail it to the barn-door. By the middle of the last century it had become a rarity, and the ensuing rush for specimens and eggs for private collectors quickly brought about its virtual extinction. The kite is but one of several species--six of them hawks--extirpated within the last forty years. Why, then, does the daw, more injurious to the game-preserver and henwife than any one of these lost hawks, continue to flourish and increase in numbers? It is, I imagine, because of the growth of a sentiment which favours its preservation. But it is not the same as that which has served to preserve the rook and made it so common. That is a sentiment confined to the landowning cla.s.s--to those who inherit great houses where the ancient rookery with its crowd of big, black, contentious birds caw-cawing on the windy elms, has come to be an essential part of the establishment, like the gardens and park and stables and home-farm and, one might add, the church and village. This sentiment differs, too, from the heron-sentiment, which serves to keep that bird with us in spite of the annual wail, rising occasionally in South Devon to a howl, of human trout-fishers. It is a traditional feeling coming down from the far past in England--from the time of William the Conqueror to that of William of Orange and the decay of falconry. That a species without any sentiment to favour it and without special protection by law may increase is to be seen in the case of the starling. This increase has come about automatically after we had destroyed the starling's natural enemies and then ceased to persecute it ourselves. Of all birds it was the most preyed on by certain raptorial species, especially by the sparrowhawk, which is now becoming so rare, a.s.sisted by the hobby (rarer still) and the merlin. It was more exposed than other birds to these enemies owing to its gregarious and feeding habits in gra.s.slands and the open country, also to its slower flight.

The greatest drain on the species, came, however, from man. The starling was a favourite bird for shooting-matches up till about thirty years ago, and was taken annually in large numbers by the bird-catchers for the purpose. It is probable that this use of the bird for sport caused people to eat it, and so common did the habit become that at the end of summer, or before the end, shooting starlings for the pot was practised everywhere. Old men in the country have told me that forty or fifty years ago it was common to hear people on the farms say that of all birds the starling was the best to eat.

When starling and sparrow shooting-matches declined, the starling went out of favour as a table-bird, and from that time the species has been increasing. At present the rate of increase grows from year to year, and during the last decade the birds have colonized every portion of the north of Scotland and the islands, where the starling had previously been a rare visitor--a bird unknown to the people. Here in West Cornwall where I am writing this chapter the starling was only a winter visitor until recently. Eight years ago I could only find two pairs breeding in the villages--about twenty-five in number--in which I looked for them; in the summer of 1915 I found them breeding in every town and village I visited. At present, June, 1916, there are six pairs in the village I am staying at. It may be the case, and from conversations I have had with farmers about the bird I am inclined to believe it is so, that a strong feeling in favour of the starling (in the pastoral districts) is growing up at the present time, a feeling which in the end is more powerful to protect than any law; but such a feeling has not become general as yet, and consequently has had nothing to do with the extraordinary increase of the bird.

The wood-pigeon is another species which, like the starling, has increased greatly in recent years, without special protection and with no sentiment in its favour... . The sentiment is all confined to the nature-lovers, whose words have no effect on the people generally, least of all on the farmers. I am reminded here of the experience of a young man, an ardent bird-lover, on his visit to a Yorkshire farm. His host, who was also a young man, took him a walk across his fields. It was a spring day of brilliant sunshine, and the air was full of the music of scores of soaring skylarks. The visitor long in cities pent, was exhilarated by the strains and kept on making exclamations of rapturous delight, "Just listen to the larks! Did you ever hear anything like it!"

and so on.

His host, his eyes cast down, trudged on in glum silence. Finally the young man, carried away by his enthusiasm, stopped and turning to his companion shouted, "Listen! Listen! Do you hear the larks?"

"Oh, yes," drawled the other, looking more glum than ever, "I hear them fast enough. And I wish they were all dead!"

So with the other charming species. The moan of doves in immemorial elms is a pleasing sound to the poets, but it does not prevent the farmers throughout the land from wishing them all dead; and every person who possesses a gun is glad to help in their ma.s.sacre. For the bird is a pest and he who shoots it is doing something for England; furthermore, shooting it is first-rate sport, not like slaughtering wretched little sparrows or innocent young rooks just out of their windy cradles. And when shot it is a good table-bird, with as much tasty flesh on it as a woodc.o.c.k or partridge.

How, then can we account for the increase of such a species? One cause is undoubtedly to be found in the removal by gamekeepers of its three chief enemies--the carrion crow, magpie, and jay--all these three being great devourers of pigeon's eggs, which of all eggs are most conspicuous and open to attack. Then again the winter immigration of wood-pigeons from northern Europe appears to be on the increase, and it may be conjectured that a considerable number of these visitors remain annually to breed with us. There has also been an increase in the stockdove and turtle-dove in recent years, and the former species is extending its range in the north. The cause or causes of the increase of the turtledove are not far to seek. Its chief feathered enemies, the egg and fledgling robbers, are the same as the wood-pigeon's; moreover, the turtledove is least persecuted by man of our four pigeons, and being strictly migratory it quits the country before shooting-time begins; add to this that the turtle-dove has been specially protected under Sir Herbert Maxwell's Act of 1894 in a good number of English counties, from Surrey to Yorkshire.

Of the stock-dove we can only say that, like the ring-dove, it has increased in spite of the persecution it is subject to, since no person out after pigeons would spare it because it is without a white collar.

With the exception of the county of Buckinghamshire it is not on the schedule anywhere in the country. One can only suppose that this species has been indirectly benefited by the bird legislation and all that has been done to promote a feeling favourable to bird-preservation during the last thirty years.

V

THE DAW SENTIMENT

I have spoken of the wood adjacent to the villages of Hayle and Lelant where the rooks, daws, and starlings of the neighbourhood have their winter roosting-place. This is at Trevelloe, the ancient estate of the Praeds, who now call themselves Tyringham. Here the daws congregate each evening in such numbers that a stranger to the district and to the local habits of the bird might imagine that all the cliff-breeding jackdaws in West Cornwall had come to roost at that spot. Yet the cliff-breeders, albeit abundant enough, are but a minority of the daw population of this district. The majority of these birds live and breed in the neighbouring villages and hamlets--St. Ives, Carbis Bay, Towadneck, Lelant, Phillack, Hayle, and others further away. It is a jackdaw metropolis and, as we have seen, every village receives its own quota of birds each morning, and there they spend the daylight hours and subsist on the waste food and on what they can steal, just as the semi-domestic raven and the kite did in former ages, from Roman times down to the seventeenth century.

Early in May the winter congregation breaks up, the cliff-breeders going back to the rocks and the village birds to their chimneys, where they presently set about relining their old nests. There are plenty of places for all, since there are chimneys in almost every cottage where fires are never lighted, and as ventilation is not wanted in bedrooms the birds are allowed to bring in more materials each year, until the whole flue is filled up. Year by year the materials brought in, sink lower and lower until they rest on the closed iron register and change in time to a solid brown mould. Thus, however long-lived a daw may be--and there are probably more centenarians among the daws than among the human inhabitants of the villages--it is a rare thing for one to be disturbed in his tenancy.

In the cottage opposite the one I was staying in, its owner, an old woman who had lived in it all her life, had recently died, aged eighty-seven.

She was very feeble at the last, and one cold day when she could not leave her bed, the extraordinary idea occurred to some one of her people that it might be a good thing to light a fire in her room. The fireplace was examined and was found to have no flue, or that the flue had been filled with earth or cement. The village builder was called in, and with the aid of a man on the roof and poles and various implements he succeeded in extracting two or three barrow-loads of hard earth which had no doubt once been sticks, centuries ago, as the building was very ancient. No one had remembered that the daws had always occupied the same chimney; the old dame herself had seen them going in and out of it from her childhood, and her end was probably hastened by the disturbance made in cleaning it. Now she is gone the daws here are in possession of it once more.

All through the month of May daws were to be seen about the village, dropping from time to time upon the chimney-pots where they had their nests and occasionally bringing some slight materials to form a new lining, but it was very rare to see one with a stick in his beak. The flues were already full of old sticks and no more were wanted. It was amusing to see a bird flying about, suddenly tumble out of the air on to a chimneypot, then with tail tipped up and wings closed, dive into the cavity below. One wondered how the young birds would be got out!

Talking with the rector of the neighbouring parish of Phillack one day on this subject, he said, "Don't imagine that the daws restrict themselves to the chimneys where fires are not lighted. At all events it isn't so at Phillack. Perhaps we have too many daws in our village, but every year before lighting fires in the drawing and dining-rooms we have to call in a man with a pole to clear the flues out." He told me that a few years ago, one cold June day, a fire was lighted in the drawing-room, and as the smoke all poured out into the room a man was sent up to the roof with a pole to clear the obstruction out. Presently a mess of sticks came down and with them two fully-fledged young jackdaws, one dead, killed with the pole, the other sound and lively.

This one they kept and it soon became quite tame; when able to fly it would go off and a.s.sociate with the wild birds, but refused to leave the house until the following summer, when it found a mate and went away.

The head keeper at Trevelloe, a remarkably vigorous and intelligent octogenarian who has been in his place over half a century, gave me some interesting information about the daws. He says they have greatly increased in recent years in this part of Cornwall because they are no longer molested; no person, he says, not even a game-keeper anxious about his pheasants, would think of shooting a jackdaw. But this is not because the bird has changed its habits. He is as great a pest as ever he was, and as an example of how bad jackdaws can be, he related the following incident told him by a friend of his, a head keeper on an estate adjoining a shooting his master took one year on the northwest coast of England. It happened that a big colony of daws existed within a mile or two of the preserves, and one day the keeper was called' away in a hurry and left the coops unattended for the best part of a day; it was the biggest mistake he had ever made and the chief disaster of his life.

On his return he found that the daws had been before him and that all his precious chicks had been carried off. For several hours of that day there was a steady coming and going of birds between the cliffs and the coops, every daw going back with a chick in his beak for his hungry young in the nest.

Yet my informant, this ancient and singularly intelligent old man, a gamekeeper all his life, who knows his jackdaw, could not tell me why gamekeepers no longer persecute so injurious a bird I He will not allow a sparrow-hawk to exist in his woods, yet all he could say when I repeated my question was, "No keeper ever thinks of hurting a jack now, but I can't say why."

The reason of it I fancy is plain enough; it is simply the sentiment I have spoken of. In a small way it has always existed in certain places, in towns, where the jackdaw is a.s.sociated in our minds with cathedrals and church towers--where he is the "ecclesiastical daw"; but the modern wider toleration is due to the character, the personality, of the bird itself, which is more or less like that of all the members of the corvine family, with the exception of the rook, who always tries his best to be an honest, useful citizen; but it is not precisely the same.

They may be regarded as bad hats generally In the bird community, and on this very account--"I'm sorry to say," to quote Mr. Pecksniff--they touch a chord in us; and the daw being the genial rascal in feathers par excellence is naturally the best loved.

It has thus come about that of all the Corvidae the daw is now the favourite as a pet bird, and in the domestic condition he is accorded more liberty than is given to other species. We think he makes better use of his freedom, that he does not lose touch with his human friends when allowed to fly about, and appears more capable of affection.

Formerly, the raven and magpie came first as pets. The raven vanished as a pet, because like the goshawk, kite, and buzzard, he was extirpated in the interests of the game-preserver and hen-wife. The magpie was then first, and has only been recently ousted from that ancient, honourable position. The pie was a superior bird as a feathered pet in a cage; he is beautiful in shape and colour in his snow-white and metallic dark-green and purple-glossed plumage, and his long graduated tail.

Moreover, he is a clever bird. To my mind there is no more fascinating species when I can find it in numbers, in places where it is not persecuted, and is accustomed to congregate at intervals, not as rooks and starlings do merely because they are gregarious, but purely for social purposes--to play and converse with one another. Its language at such times is so various as to be a surprise and delight to the listener; while its ways of amusing itself, its clowning and the little tricks and practical jokes the birds are continually playing on each other, are a delight to witness. All this is lost in a caged bird. He is handsome to look at and remarkably intelligent, but he distinguishes between magpies and men; he doesn't reveal himself; his accomplishments, vocal and mental, are for his own tribe. In this he differs from the daw; for the daw is less specialized; he is an undersized common crow, livelier, more impish than that bird, also more plastic, more adaptive, and takes more kindly to the domestic or parasitic life. Human beings to him are simply larger daws, and unlike the pie he can play his tricks and be himself among them as freely as when with his feathered comrades.

We like him best because he makes himself one of us.

Undoubtedly the chough comes nearest to the daw mentally, and as it is a far more beautiful bird--the poor daw having little of that quality--it would probably have been our prime favourite among the crows but for its rarity. Formerly it was a common pet bird, caged or free, in all the coast districts where it inhabited, and it may be that the desire for a pet chough was the cause of its decline and final disappearance all round the south and west coasts of England, except at one spot near Tintagel where half a dozen pairs still exist only because watchers appointed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are always on the spot to warn off the nest-robbers during the breeding season. But of the chough in captivity or as a domesticated bird we know little now, as no records have been preserved. I have only known one bird, taken from a North Devon cliff about forty years ago, at a house near the coast; a very beautiful pet bird with charming, affectionate ways, always free to range about the country and the cliffs, where it a.s.sociated with the daws. It was the last of its kind at that place, and I do not know if it still lives.

Next to the chough the jay comes nearest to the daw mentally of all our crows, and as he excels most of our wild birds in beauty he would naturally have been a first favourite as a pet but for the fact that it is only in a state of nature in which he is like the daw--lively, clever, impish; in captivity he is more like the magpie and affiliates even less than that bird with his human a.s.sociates. In confinement he is a quiet, almost sedate, certainly a silent bird: He is essentially a woodland species; all his graces, his various, often musical, language, with many imitations of bird and animal sounds, and his spectacular games and pretty wing displays, are for his own people exclusively. He must have his liberty in the woods and a company of his fellow-jays to exhibit his full l.u.s.tre.