How to Enjoy Birds

Preface

Nec tenui penna

ONE day I found the publisher in no mood to discuss new projects for books; one would have thought there was nothing he desired less than to think of publishing a book. He began to tell me about a garden of which he was newly possessed, and how, in the garden, there were birds:

The ousel-cock, so black of hue,

With orange-tawny bill,

The throstle with his note so true,

The wren with little quill.

These birds, it seemed, distracted his attention at breakfast-time, when they would gather at a little table which somebody had set up outside the breakfast-room window; and he had observed some remarkable points in their habits. He had discovered, and was certain, that the Robin’s wife, Jenny-Wren, sang a different song from her mate’s; and it was not until he had made this discovery that he knew that hen birds sang. Still more remarkable, the Hedge-Sparrow sang the same tune as the Robin’s wife. And this raised another puzzle: why should the Sparrow of the house merely chirp, while the Sparrow of the hedge warbled so blithely? Then among other curious discoveries he mentioned that his garden possessed a brown Blackbird!

I ventured to suggest the publication of a book about birds, which should solve the mysteries they present to a publisher.

I might consider it, if, said the publisher, musing, it were a very simple book—for people who know nothing about birds—yet not a text-book, mark you, but a book to make us see what pleasure we may gain from the company of birds; to show us that birds are more than feathers; to teach us, as it were, how to enjoy birds. It is a pleasant thing to be taught how to enjoy. . . .

In the end, I went home, and copied from the journals I have kept for twenty years and more, recording my observations on birds, all the simplest passages I could find, showing how pleasant and lovely they are in their lives:

The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,

The plain-song cuckoo gray,

Whose note full many a man doth mark,

And dares not answer nay.

MARCUS WOODWARD.

Christmas, 1928.

In Our Garden

Robin cocks and Jenny Wrens

Are God Almighty’s cocks and hens.

IF the Robin is the best-loved of British birds, a main reason may be because it is the most friendly and familiar. It wins our hearts by the fearless way it takes possession of our gardens, and shares our labours—so confidingly perching on the spade-handle if we rest a moment—and by entering our homes to share our crumbs.

Not like a beggar is he come,

But enters as a looked-for guest.

It trusts, as the poet sings, in the power of its ruddy shield. Wordsworth’s Robin was the pious bird, a testimony to its burial of the Babes in the Wood. It is true, Bobbie goes often to church. But perhaps the poet never saw two Robins fighting. Pugnacity may be the truer key-note of the Robin’s character than piety. John Donne hit off the bird’s appeal in his phrase, The household bird with the red stomacher.

One grove will not nurture two Robins, as the Romans said in a proverb, and some mysterious problems are raised by the saying. The parents go into retirement for the dangerous days of moulting, and may rarely be seen in the garden they have haunted since the last autumn. When they return, spruce in new feathers, and in fine fighting fettle, their offspring possess their Eden. Then comes the tug-of-war. Suppose the old cock, after days of battle, drives his hopefuls from his special grove, what fate befalls them? Some naturalists suggest they migrate overseas. They may go no farther than the next grove. Possibly one drives forth his parent—to what fate we know not. When a cock of a walk disappears, his place may be occupied forthwith by another. And so it has happened when a tame Robin has lived for season after season in a cottager’s hovel, and has died at last by mischance—in the twinkling of an eye, another has appeared to reign in its stead, truly entering the cottage like a looked-for guest.

It is to be observed that the Robin of the garden in winter may not be identical with the Robin of summer, or come of the same stock; for the bird of summer may have journeyed south, and left its domain to some wanderer from the north. There is no doubt that Robins have a strong migratory instinct, while Continental Robins are notable travellers.

Another mystery shrouds the song of the hen. Some naturalists state as a proven fact that the hen fights like her swashbuckler of a lord, and sings. Robins’ songs vary much in quality, and it may be that the hens sing the feebler songs of autumn when the birds are battling for their winter beats. The duel is always preceded by a vocal contest, and for a long time before blows are struck the garden resounds with the sharp challenging calls, tsit, tsit.

When in autumn the Redbreast whistles from the garden croft there are few to rival the song. We are inexpressibly indebted to the Robin for its autumn music, its requiem of the dying year. It is master-singer of September, as the Mistle-Thrush is of March, and the Nightingale of May, and it has the concert-platform to itself in garden and wood. It gives us more music in autumn than in spring, while there are more minstrels in the troupe; the cocks of the year, having discarded their Thrush-like buff spots on the breast and put on red waistcoats, tune up, and Continental Robins may come for the winter. The Robin’s song has almost matchless qualities, in the way the notes are dwelt upon, and run into one another, in their plaintiveness and pensiveness, so full of exquisite tenderness, so sweetly modulated. The song seems a sad one, in a minor key, the sweeter for telling of saddest thoughts. It is the song of the falling leaves, and sets to music the feelings and thoughts that come unbidden in the September garden when we look for the last roses, as the melancholy cry of the Partridge in the stubbles is in harmony with the rising of the harvest moon. A deliberate singer, the Robin seems to be pleasing itself with various airs, dwelling so fondly on long-drawn notes, and repeating favourite passages. Where three or four are gathered in a garden, their challenging songs are heard through the autumn day, one singer often waiting for another to finish before it begins. Towards roosting-time, we hear a peculiar call, a melancholy sort of wail or a sorrowful sighing, reminding us of the lady in the ballad, She made her sighs to sing.

In nesting days, as in autumn, each pair of Robins likes to possess its own little kingdom, where no stranger Robin is tolerated, but now and then two pairs will chance to nest close together on their frontier line. There were two pairs which elected to build on ledges at opposite corners of a thatched summer-house, scarcely six feet apart, the roof serving for a watershed strictly dividing their spheres of influence. The first egg was laid in either nest on the same morning, but it was not observed that the families ever grew to be on calling terms.

Down the lane, the school children, picking white violets, hit on the secret of a Robin’s five eggs in a bank-nest, a perilous site. Within an inch runs the highway of the rats; the bank harbours grass-snakes, the ditch a hedgehog; the lane is a haunt of egg-sucking Jays; and stoats and weasels, like the children, are an ever-present danger. Country people say that cats will not harm Robins, but they pull the young from the nest. The family affairs make a story in three chapters; twelve days may go on building the nest—not forgetting a doormat of dead leaves, at the entrance—twelve on hatching, and twelve more on preparing the nestlings to face the world.

A garden nestful of Robins gives a chance to tame the youngsters, and they will quickly become wonderfully familiar. If one person feeds the nestlings daily with scraps of chopped meat, they learn to know their friend, and will become eager to greet him when he passes. In time they will perch fearlessly on an outstretched hand, three or four together, and haply may long continue to be garden pets, and sacred to the household gods.

The Robin always sings a song of autumn regardless of the season, but the piping of the Song-Thrush in autumn strikes no melancholy note. It finds life most jolly, and sings in gladsome strain whether at matins or vespers, in shine or shower, in the spring or in the Fall. It seems to take a pride in its artistry, singing slow, then fast, loud, then low, and varying sweetness with harshness; one might think that several birds sang at varying distances. We lift up our hearts at the song of the Thrush; it strikes responsive chords. Clear as a bell, yet it is mellow like a Blackbird’s whistle. Now it peals forth in a phrase bluff, hearty and homely; then comes a tender passage. It sings from January onwards, far into summer; falls silent while moulting; and in autumn tries to recapture something of its spring rapture. In gardens of great towns, the song of the Thrush in November seems even more arresting than in rural ways. The Cockney Thrush commands a good audience, and its music is doubly welcome when arising from the drab and sooty shrubberies of some city square, in the gloom of a foggy afternoon.. While its notes have the charm of variety and surprise, it constantly repeats favourite phrases—he sings each song thrice over—and what appeals to many is the human quality in the fine soprano voice, and the way it seems to fit phrases like Shut-the-gate! or Pretty Poll, or Wait-a-bit, wait-a-bit! West countrymen hold the Thrush to be Queen of Song, since the capricious Nightingale is rarely heard in their country to challenge the title.

The note of conscious pride in the song sometimes seems to be repeated in the nest which is decorated in an unusual style; in one story a Thrush hit on the charming adornment of fresh peach-blossoms, and made a picture of pride as she sat within her flowery bower.

The first new song of a new year to be heard in a garden may be to the credit of a Mistle-Thrush, largest and boldest of its tribe. Its task is to challenge winter, and call in spring, and it redeems the dullest day of mid-winter, as it sounds its tocsin from a reeling elm-top. If the Blackbird is the great contralto, the Mistle-Thrush is the unrivalled soprano of the feathered choir. Songs will seem to express what we imagine to be the characters of the singers. The Blackbird’s slow and leisurely lay, at times almost furtive, becomes one given to skulking on the ground in shadowy shrubberies. But the song of the Mistle-Thrush is uttered defiantly from the topmost spray of the elm, though tempests rage, and between whiles it makes aggressive attacks on any birds which challenge its mightiness.

In winter it will often elect to live a solitary life, and to take possession