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    Birds and Men
    Birds and Men
    Birds and Men
    Ebook481 pages10 hours

    Birds and Men

    By E. M. Nicholson

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    Revealing the impact of civilisation upon our bird life, with particular reference to the species that have come to rely largely on types of habitat greatly modified or actually formed by human action. This edition is exclusive to newnaturalists.com

    This, the first book on birds in the New Naturalist main series, is undoubtedly one of the most important contributions to the literature of British ornithology of recent years. Its subject is the impact of civilisation upon our bird life, with particular reference to the species that have come to rely largely on types of habitat greatly modified or actually formed by human action. Mr. Nicholson is already well known to many for his popularisation of the scientific study of birds as a means of their protection, and it is not surprising, therefore, that this volume should also be concerned with the ways in which birds and men can live happily together.

    Readers will be delighted by his combination of the aesthetic approach with serious criticism, and particularly by the note of optimism in the book – the suggestion that not all the works of man are fated to destroy nature, and that some of them are likely to improve the quality and variety of our birds. From the ornithological point of view, we have an interesting half-century before us. It is extremely probable that at the end of it BIRDS AND MEN will still be widely read, and quarried for facts and conclusions by the next generation of naturalists.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateMay 31, 2012
    ISBN9780007406159
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      Birds and Men - E. M. Nicholson

      EDITORS’ PREFACE

      THE Editors of the New Naturalist would wish for no other author of the first bird book in their main series than E. M. Nicholson.

      During the present century ornithology has changed from a particular study by a coterie of scientists and privileged amateurs to a much wider subject, with a considerable public following. Nicholson was one of the first to recognise this change. His own interest in birds had developed early; he grew particularly interested in bird territory and ecology through the influence of H. Eliot Howard and others, and was the first British worker seriously to embark upon a proper classification of bird habitats, and an assessment of the populations of common land-birds. His interests have included, and still include, marine ornithology, the comparative and evolutionary study of bird songs and voices, the relation of birds to their habitats—their autecology, the study of the numbers of birds and their changes: all these subjects were new when he first explored them, and particularly lend themselves to co-operative investigation by teams of collaborators.

      In his earliest book, Birds in England (Chapman & Hall, 1926) Nicholson showed that he had come to realise that our knowledge of birds could be substantially increased by encouraging amateurs to join the ranks of the critical investigators. His second book, How Birds Live (Williams & Norgate, 1927) dealt purely with the habits of birds. In 1931, however, with The Art of Bird Watching (Witherby) he returned to the task of promoting co-operation, in order to solve purely ornithological problems. The next step was inevitable: when the British Trust for Ornithology was founded in 1933, he was its first Secretary, and a close association between organised amateur ornithology and the University of Oxford began, which soon resulted in the foundation of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology. During the rest of the ‘thirties Nicholson devoted a great deal of his spare time to the Trust, though his contributions to published ornithology during this period included many scientific papers and two books on the Songs of Wild Birds (Witherby, 1936 and 1937) which show that his aesthetic approach to birds is as sensitive as his powers of scientific criticism.

      The second world war failed to sever Nicholson’s connection with active ornithology, though he had to watch his wrynecks at Potsdam, and make notes at Cairo and Quebec, and listen to jackdaws in Downing Street. For Nicholson’s alter ego is Secretary to the Office of the Lord President of the Council. Not long ago he became Chairman of the British Trust for Ornithology, and once more active in the organisation that he has done so much to build; now he is Chairman of its Research Committee.

      Nicholson must not be thought to be in any way a victim of the machine he has helped to create. He has always seen beyond the problems of organisation to the objects for which they were devised, the extension of ornithology into fresh fields. When the editors of this book asked him for his own concept of his aim of an ornithologist his reply contained no mention of organisation. It was as follows: To look at birds …, to describe faithfully and … to measure resourcefully and accurately, to speculate stimulatingly but tentatively, to set things in their historical and biological perspective, and to recognise that ornithology is the business and the joint contribution of all ornithologists, whoever and wherever they are.

      We greet this new book; a book about the impact of man upon birds, and of birds upon man—the subject that has been close to his heart for many years, and on which he has been collecting multifarious notes. The result of his analysis and synthesis is—we know its readers will agree—a most stimulating and original contribution, and a new milestone in the progress of British ornithology. We are sure readers will be particularly delighted at the note of optimism that pervades it—the suggestion that not all the works of man are fated to destroy nature, and that some are likely to improve the quantity and variety of our birds. It is clear that we have a most interesting half-century before us, from the ornithological point of view; and at the end of it this work will, we expect, be still widely read, and quarried for facts and conclusions, by the next generation of comparative ecologists and field naturalists.

      THE EDITORS

      AUTHOR’S PREFACE

      WHEN the Editors invited me to write this book they offered me an opportunity to complete a picture of the impact of civilisation on our bird life for which I had drawn a first sketch in Birds In England over twenty years ago. Here was a chance to trace the shaping of our towns and countryside and the life-histories and ecology of their most characteristic birds. In taking this opportunity I soon found that far too little is yet known to allow anything approaching a complete picture to be drawn, although it is true that enough has been learnt recently to give us a much better idea of the subject. What I have done here, therefore, amounts to no more than a fuller and more mature sketch from a new angle, emphasising salient features and a certain amount of detail, and bringing out some of the gaps remaining to be filled in our knowledge of the facts and of underlying forces. I have not hesitated to look forward as well as back, since nothing is more misleading than to accept the assumption that the particular pattern of bird life which we see in any given place at any given time is in any way more normal or enduring than the different patterns which have just preceded and will soon follow it. For a similar reason I have tried to describe bird life in Britain against the background of the distribution and habits of the same birds in other lands, not exhaustively but as a reminder that the birds we see here also live in other countries, sometimes on different terms. To begin to understand, say, a wren, we need to take not only a wren’s-eye view of the nearest heap of brushwood but a broader sweep of vision over the thin brown line of wrens which girdles the northern world from Iceland and Ireland through Europe, Siberia and North America to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

      This book is concerned with the normal habits and characteristics of a selected group of birds, and with variations and exceptions in habits which throw light on the normal. The fullness or brevity of treatment or the omission of reference to a species is determined by the degree to which it has become dependent on men in the British Isles and has come to rely largely upon types of habitat greatly modified or actually formed by human action. In the description of species attention has similarly been concentrated on those aspects which throw most light on their capacity to adapt themselves to or to exploit civilisation. A large number of references to aberrations and isolated occurrences have been omitted to avoid cluttering up the text with detail or with relatively unimportant qualifications to statements which apply in at least ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. Where such occasional variations are unmentioned it is because they have not been considered of sufficient importance, but no doubt others would sometimes select differently, while occurrences which now seem exceptional or erratic may be shown to be more usual by fuller observation, or may represent the first appearance of new habits which will later become widespread, such as paper-tearing by tits.

      It might well be argued that certain species not fully treated here, such as the chaffinch, blue tit, whitethroat and kestrel, have as good a claim as some of those described at length. This problem where to draw the line is inherent in the series of New Naturalist books on birds as planned at present, which aims to review British bird life in a series of broad habitat groupings; it is the price we have to pay for the greater freedom to trace the relation of birds to their environment permitted by the scheme. Birds whose main or most typical habitat does not fall within the scope of this work, such as birds most densely distributed in woodland, or on uncultivated heaths and moorland are to be fully treated in the other books.

      In describing the more characteristic species within its scope this book deals more fully than usual with habitats, ecology, population, and distribution, which repay more attention than they frequently get. Other aspects are more summarily dealt with for various reasons. Identification details are amply available elsewhere, and no attempt has been made to provide here more than a general sketch of what the bird actually looks like in the field, based upon notes made in field conditions instead of descriptions taken from corpses and skins. Nests, eggs and breeding biology can also be so fully and conveniently traced elsewhere that extended treatment has not seemed necessary for them. Description of display has been kept within strict limits since it can so easily take an excessive share of space and tax the reader with visualising movements much more appropriately recorded by the lens and the film than by the eye and the written word. Bird songs and calls have been more fully described and recorded with gramophone records, by Ludwig Koch and myself in Songs of Wild Birds and More Songs of Wild Birds, and are also briefly treated here.

      I have tried in each case to bring out the different character and way of life of each species, and in choosing sources I have generally preferred to use my own notes rather than to compile from the writings of others, although I am of course indebted to many other observers who have broken new ground or have dealt with aspects outside my own limited experience. It will generally be apparent from the text where I am writing from my own observation, and in most cases I have tried to indicate where the observation was made, since this is often more relevant than used to be believed when the great variety and constant evolution of bird habits were less well understood. A brief note on any important published sources used in each chapter of the text is added at the end of the book. Witherby’s Handbook of British Birds, which has been constantly at my elbow for points of distribution, migration, food and breeding biology, is not cited elsewhere, since its essentiality as a source is self-evident.

      In accordance with modern practice for field ornithology I have dealt with species, not subspecies, unless the subspecies is clearly separable in the field and its separation is significant for the birdwatcher as distinct from the taxonomist. Scientific names of the principal species treated are listed at the beginning of each of the chapters concerned, and a complete list of scientific names can be found here. I have used English names in accordance with the Handbook except in the following cases, where I consider¹ a change is called for :—

      In all these cases the alternative name is already widely used, and in some it is the older as well as the briefer and more convenient English name.

      Finally let me apologise to the readers of this book for its many shortcomings and hope that some of them may feel moved to help in dispelling some of the cloud of ignorance which still covers so much of its subject. Those who do so will not be disappointed. No part of ornithology is more interesting, no part is seeing more rapid change, and none is more important.

      E.M.N.

      LONDON

      25 June 1950

      CHAPTER 1

      HOW MEN

      HAVE SHAPED NATURE

      THIS book will aim to tell the story of how men have shaped nature in Britain and have thus cast the bird population into its present mould. It will outline the ways in which the affairs of birds and men have become mixed up together, and will describe the birds of farmlands, of garden, orchard, and hedgerow, and of towns and buildings, leaving to other writers in this series the description of sea and shore birds, of marsh and inland water birds, of mountain and moorland birds and of the birds of woodlands and forests. Finally it will discuss some possible ways of enabling birds and men to live more harmoniously together in Britain. The ground to be covered is vast, and could not be covered thoroughly in one book, even if the subject had been sufficiently explored by research, as it has not. If inevitably this book must fail to provide a comprehensive and final statement over its entire field I hope at least that it will not fail to show how important and how interesting that field is, and to stimulate further and more pointed studies.

      To shape a landscape is to shape its bird life. The occurrence and scale of mountains, hills and moorlands, of forests and trees, of lakes, rivers and marshes, of cliffs, shingles and mudflats determine so definitely the general character of bird populations that an expert ornithologist with a good map could make a useful guess at the birds likely to be found even in an entirely unfamiliar area. This book however is not concerned with the geological, climatic and other natural forces which have fundamentally moulded the British landscape; it takes up the story only at the point where man comes on the scene.

      The landscape of Britain now is a work of nature more or less modified and in extreme cases practically obliterated and superseded by man’s efforts. These efforts, although so complex in their effects, have primarily been achieved through one or other form of five elementary instruments—the axe, the spade, the plough, the hod and the wheel.

      Man’s first foothold in Britain, in contrast to what happened in North America, was won before these instruments had been perfected and become widely available. For a long time, therefore, most of the areas in which human population is now concentrated remained practically inaccessible, covered by vast masses of trees or inland water, or some impenetrable blend of both. The birds which lived in these forests and swamps gained protection from human pursuit owing to the dangerous wild beasts, such as wolves, which still found shelter in them, while men were powerless either to clear the forests and drain the swamps or even to exploit them at all extensively. Probably only the upland areas, some of the more barren soils and parts of the coasts and outlying islands were freely accessible, and these were too exposed or too inhospitable to support more than scattered inhabitants.

      In the first long phase of human colonisation, therefore, it seems likely that forest and marsh birds continued in occupation of an immensely larger part of Britain than anything we have known within historic times. There are now less than 3 million acres out of Great Britain’s 56 millions under any sort of woodland; before the axe got to work there must have been at least 20 millions, and perhaps substantially more. The acreage of more or less unwooded marsh and fen, particularly in eastern England, must have been relatively much greater still in comparison with the present miserable remnants. But the scale and character of the hill grazings and moorlands must have changed very much less, although burning and grazing have destroyed much of the primitive texture. They can never have been densely occupied or much cut about and altered by man, and in so far as they were occupied the human population has been retreating from them for many generations. We know that as an exception the chalk downs of southern England were quite considerably populated in neolithic times, and these downs with their camps, lynchets and barrows clearly bear the aspect of places long inhabited by people but now again largely given over to wild life. Many of these places, such as that where Stane Street crosses the Sussex Downs, or the Great Ridge Wood on Salisbury Plain, are now among the loneliest and most primeval-looking in southern Britain, while others which until far later times were virgin forest and untrodden marsh are now overrun by men and their buildings.

      Field birds such as skylarks and lapwings, birds attached to livestock such as swallows, and sharp-eyed opportunists such as jackdaws and other crows must have been among the first species to adapt themselves to man as a herdsman and later a cultivator of the more open and less unfriendly tracts of the uplands and elsewhere. Unquestionably the relations which go furthest back and have least changed must be those between birds and man as a farmer. Man as a hunter has no doubt been active for even longer. Avebury Museum contains the femur of a blackbird (the species cannot actually be identified) which was found with, and is capable of reproducing ornamentation on, clay pottery dated about 2500–1900 B.C. Here man the hunter is already supplying man the craftsman with tools, and man the farmer has just begun to remould Britain. But many of the primeval quarry have probably become extinct and it is unlikely that many of the present sporting birds were effectively attacked until comparatively modern times, especially since a surprising number of them are now represented by either wholly or largely introduced stocks or by quite recent colonists. Except in giving birds grounds to fear him man the hunter has left little impression on bird life compared with man the farmer.

      As Sir John Clapham put it in A Concise Economic History of Britain from the Earliest Times to 1750:—

      … when the first farmers crossed a narrower Channel … Lowland Britain was … covered with ‘damp oak’ forest—oak and hazel, bramble, and thorn, thorn, thorn. Valleys were waterlogged and marshy. Great parts of the drier ground were also stocked by nature with well-grown oak and ash, beech, birch and yew—hard to clear with stone axes. Forest or scrub probably spread over the dry chalk and limestone ridges—the Downs, the Cotswolds and such. But the vegetation was more open and had some natural gaps. These you could extend and your goats would nibble down the seedlings; there is nothing like a goat for stopping the spread or revival of forest. In any case it is on such ridges, from the South Downs westward into Devon, that ten or a dozen settlements of these first farmers have been examined. They were mainly cattle keepers; but they also kept goats, sheep and pigs, and they cultivated little plots of wheat, probably using some sort of digging stick to turn the ground, or a pick made of a deer’s antler to furrow it.

      These first farmers only got to work about 2400 B.C., and not much more than a hundred and forty generations of countrymen, or about 4300 generations of skylarks, have intervened between the first faint contact between birds and farmers in Britain and the tractor-driven agriculture of the present time. During the greater part of this period British agriculture was an almost negligible influence, the increase of population and of land under the plough in lowland Britain having only seriously begun about the 8th century B.C., while only in the 1st century B.C. did the total amount of land worked with oxen reach an appreciable scale, and it was only in that century also that agriculture began to produce a sufficient surplus to enable the beginnings of the first towns to emerge.

      It was probably not until the Roman invasion that man even began to emerge as a really important influence on bird life in Britain. The axe then got to work making the first sizeable clearings in the forests, and paved roads constructed by engineers enabled the wheel to begin its task of spreading civilisation. While it is impossible to trace the effects on bird-life of this process of clearing the forests, which continued off and on for at least fifteen centuries, there is no reason to suppose that it was on balance adverse either to the variety or even to the total numbers of woodland birds. A high proportion of the bird population of woodlands in any case frequents the fringes, and most of the characteristic woodland species seem to have adapted themselves without difficulty to parkland, orchards, hedgerows and gardens, where their densities are probably sufficiently increased to compensate for a large part of the vast reduction in forest area. Some species which have not found it easy to adapt themselves must have suffered considerably—willow-tits and marsh-tits, siskins and redpolls, which all delighted in the alder and willow swamps, and probably the woodpeckers, which appear only now to be finding fresh niches. The only known woodland breeding species which may have inhabited the old forests and become extinct on account of clearings is the goshawk, and the evidence that it ever was a regular British breeding bird is flimsy. The honey-buzzard must have been handicapped too, although its actual extinction in recent times must be attributed to selfish egg-collectors and ignorant game-preservers rather than to the woodman’s axe.

      Comparison of British woodland and garden birds with those of the Continent confirms that, serious as the vast destruction of trees has been in other ways, it has not proved anything like such an impoverishing influence in the variety of our bird life as the outlying geographical position of Britain and its short and unreliable summers. But if comparison is limited to density of total woodland bird population in relation to area, Britain probably compares favourably with most parts of Europe, and also of North America.

      While the wielding of the axe and the invasion of the wheel and the plough have probably not injured our arboreal birds to anything like the extent that might have been expected, they have carved out great new habitats in which large numbers of field and town birds have been able to establish themselves within historical times. The restless teeth and feet of sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, horses and other animals kept by men have greatly assisted the replacement of woodland and heath by fields. There can be no doubt that the net effect has been a big increase in total bird population. Any feelings of comfort which may be drawn from a review of the effects of woodland clearance are however soon shattered when we turn to consider the disastrous results to bird life of the drainage of the marshes. Historically, this process followed the felling of the forests without much overlap, and while much damage to bird life was no doubt inflicted during the medieval period of gradual human infiltration into the marshlands the worst has been concentrated probably during the past five hundred years, when records enable some judgment of it to be formed. During that period we have seen the extinction as British breeding birds of the crane and spoonbill, followed in the nineteenth century by the avocet, black-tailed godwit, Savi’s warbler, black tern and ruff and reeve. These are merely the authentically recorded losses, and it is quite possible that other marsh-birds were wiped out unrecorded in the same process.¹ Others such as the marsh-harrier and the bearded tit have been reduced to such cramped remnants that their survival is in doubt almost from year to year; it looks as if the recovery of the breeding stock of bearded tits since the blizzards of early 1947 has been largely due to a fortunate influx from the Continent. The rich group of habitats formed by British marshes and fenlands has been ruined by wholesale and ruthless drainage. The loss is the more regretta ble and unaccountable because the Dutch with their passion for and knowledge of marsh drainage have yet managed to preserve intact considerably more adequate fragments of original fen.

      Up to the present time the birds of Britain have seen men first prowl as scattered feeble hunters, along the coasts and estuaries, next colonise and farm the more hospitable and less exposed uplands, and then in increasing numbers invade the great lowlands, clearing away the forests, draining the fens, creating much rich farmland and in recent times burrowing into or stripping off the surface locally for minerals and covering more and more of it with artificial and often sterile new habitats of brick, stone, concrete, tarmac and steel. Until recently man’s most drastic interventions could not go beyond limited modifications and extensions of existing habitats. The cleared woodlands and drained fens gave place to fields which merely spread over the lowlands something not entirely unlike the open grasslands naturally characteristic of other parts of Britain, or to gardens and orchards which were simply man-made arrangements of trees and shrubs. The fields were divided by hedges and windbreaks and banks using the stuff of nature, and the fens by straight dykes of water instead of naturally chaotic watercourses. Even the buildings were usually of local stone or timber or clay and the highways of the local dirt. It meant no serious strain for the bird population to adapt itself to these gradual and limited changes.

      The recent spread of a dead skin of brick and asphalt and concrete and slag roadways and runways and works of engineering and construction have set the birds a new and much tougher problem. This problem might well prove insoluble but for the hopeful element that what makes these things intolerable for birds ultimately makes them also intolerable for men. Town and country planning, landscaping, afforestation, provision of amenities, and carelessly dropped high explosives are modern civilisation’s ways of arranging to mitigate its own sterility and ugliness by enabling nature to come back to the very places where it has most determinedly been destroyed.

      Apart from the trends which are already plainly visible further threats are impending. Higher standards of living and greater mobility are permitting the human population to flood and overrun areas previously little disturbed—there is very little peace in summer now for shorebirds breeding round most of the British coasts, for instance. The growing pressure of competing claims to the use of land, and the development of such inventions as the bulldozer, the tractor, tracked vehicles, and excavators are making it economically and technically feasible to invade and destroy or modify habitats so far immune owing to their remoteness, steepness or roughness, or to the fact that they were not worth while to work with more primitive tools. Agriculture, forestry, hydro-electric and water supply undertakings and the Defence Services are all reaching out into areas previously immune from more than the most superficial human attention and interference, and in another generation the fringe of natural unmodified habitats which still surrounds the humanly exploited core of Britain may well have been whittled down to a fraction of what now remains, unless much more effective conservation policies are rapidly applied.

      So far the broad effect of civilisation has been considered in relation to some of the main habitats separately, but that is not the whole story. Bird populations are not static patterns arranged strictly in accordance with the various habitats. They are dynamic and respond to the principle that nothing succeeds like success. When therefore largish areas are modified and broken up into a patchwork of different and discordant habitats the result is not necessarily to create corresponding islands and strips of the appropriate specialist bird communities for each. It may instead be the utter rout of the more specialised and interesting birds and their wholesale replacement by a few aggressive, dominant, adaptable all-rounders. Even a big increase of bird population may be a misfortune if it consists of say starlings, sparrows, rooks and gulls accounting for the whole of the expansion, and perhaps on the strength of it crowding out some of the woodpeckers, house-martins, lapwings and curlews from places which they might otherwise have held on to.

      The problem of maintaining a rich and diversified bird life is not just one of enabling each species to continue to enjoy conditions in which it can hold its own, but of seeing that each species continues to have a broad and strong enough base on which it can successfully compete. It is the birds whose competitive bases have become too weak or narrow—the choughs, the bearded tits, the kites, the Dartford warblers and even the wrynecks, the hobbies and the barn-owls—which form the greatest problems for bird protection. On the other hand species with perhaps equally small absolute numbers but an inherently stronger competitive position, such as the black redstart, the little ringed plover, the kingfisher and the great crested grebe, do not give rise to the same anxiety, because they alone appear to be able to exploit certain habitats which are widespread or increasing, without much risk of being repressed by more dominant forms.

      With this general introduction it is now time to consider some of the main modifications which man has imposed on the natural environment in Britain, and the response which various species of birds have made to these challenges and opportunities.

      CHAPTER 2

      BIRDS OF TOWN AND FARM

      IN the course of generations, but at an ever more rapid pace, birds have become dependent directly or indirectly on people in Britain in many and varied ways. In this chapter an attempt will be made to unravel some of the main threads and to show how human arrangements for shelter, for transport and services, for food-getting, defence, sport and other activities have become the basis on which much of our bird population now exists.

      In order to provide shelter for living, people in Britain have covered a sizeable fraction of the more fertile and less exposed parts of the country with dwellings of various kinds. Wattle-and-daub, stone, brick, timber and now even concrete, steel and aluminium dwellings, ranging from small bungalows and cottages to houses of three or more storeys, terraces and rows, mansions, blocks of flats and hotels have blotted out many different habitats and created an ecological vacuum into which the most adaptable birds have poured, making use of the new opportunities.

      The most obvious use for birds to make of these humanly provided substitutes for rock and crags is simply to sit on them, and all over the country we see birds sitting on houses, either to take a rest, or to exploit them as convenient singing stands. There are two birds—the starling and the black redstart—which seem to prefer a chimney-pot or a commanding roof-ridge to any other song-post. Even such an arboreal species as the blackbird switches readily from treetop to housetop, and in Chelsea where I live blackbirds seem to be more and more preferring the artificial to the natural perch.

      Other birds are fond of sitting on roofs when they have nothing else to do. In some seaside towns gulls are conspicuous roof-sitters, particularly herring-gulls, which like to occupy a chimney to themselves if possible. At Padstow I have seen even an adult great blackback perched on a roof facing the harbour. This habit seems most frequent on houses immediately facing the sea, although at Tre-betherick, also in Cornwall, I have seen herring-gulls perched on roofs over a quarter of a mile inland. By January 1950 great blackbacks had taken to roof-sitting, among herring-gulls, by the Thames in Inner London. It is surprising that such adaptable birds as rooks, which live so close to man, should so infrequently perch on buildings, although the shyer carrion-crow quite often does, at any rate in London, and of course the crag-loving jackdaw takes to them as a matter of course.

      After the young are fledged martins have a special liking for sunning themselves on suitable warm roofs. At Newmarket on the hot afternoon of 9 August 1947, I saw

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