autumn in the new forest—red colour in mammals—november mildness—a house by the boldre—an ideal spot for small birds—abundance of nests—small mammals and the weasel's part—voles and mice—hornet and bank-vole—young shrews—a squirrel's visit—green woodpecker's drumming-tree—drumming of other species—beauty of great spotted woodpecker—the cuckoo controversy—a cuckoo in a robin's nest—behaviour of the cuckoo—extreme irritability—manner of ejecting eggs and birds from the nest—loss of irritability—insensibility of the parent robins—discourse on mistaken kindness, pain and death in nature, the annual destruction of bird life, and the young cuckoo's instinct.
here, by chance, in the early days of december 1902, at the very spot where my book begins, i am about to bring it to an end.
a few days ago, coming hither from the higher country at silchester, where the trees were already nearly bare, i was surprised to find the oak woods of this lower southern part of the new forest still in their full autumnal foliage. even now, so late in the year, after many successive days and nights of rain and wind, they are in leaf still: everywhere the woods are yellow, here where the oak predominates; the stronger golden-red and russet tints of the beech are vanished. we have rain and wind on most days, or rather mist and rain by day and wind with storms of rain by night; days, too, or parts of days, when it {2} is very dark and still, and when there is a universal greyness in earth and sky. at such times, seen against the distant slaty darkness or in the blue-grey misty atmosphere, the yellow woods look almost more beautiful than in fine weather.
the wet woodland roads and paths are everywhere strewn, and in places buried deep in fallen leaves—yellow, red, and russet; and this colour is continued under the trees all through the woods, where the dead bracken has now taken that deep tint which it will keep so long as there is rain or mist to wet it for the next four or five months. dead bracken with dead leaves on a reddish soil; and where the woods are fir, the ground is carpeted with lately-fallen needles of a chestnut red, which brightens almost to orange in the rain. now, at this season, in this universal redness of the earth where trees and bracken grow, we see that nature is justified in having given that colour—red and reddish-yellow—to all or to most of her woodland mammals. fox and foumart and weasel and stoat; the hare too; the bright squirrel; the dormouse and harvest-mouse; the bank-vole and the wood-mouse. even the common shrew and lesser shrew, though they rarely come out by day, have a reddish tinge on their fur. water-shrew and water-vole inhabit the banks of streams, and are safer without such a colour; the dark grey badger is strictly a night rover.
autumn in the new forest
sometimes about noon the clouds grow thin in that part of the sky, low down, where the sun is, and a pale gleam of sunlight filters through; even a {3} patch of lucid blue sky sometimes becomes visible for a while: but the light soon fades; after mid-day the dimness increases, and before long one begins to think that evening has come. withal it is singularly mild. one could almost imagine in this season of mist and wet and soft airs in late november that this is a land where days grew short and dark indeed, but where winter comes not, and the sensation of cold is unknown. it is pleasant to be out of doors in such weather, to stand in the coloured woods listening to that autumn sound of tits and other little birds wandering through the high trees in straggling parties, talking and calling to one another in their small sharp voices. or to walk by the boldre, or, as some call it, the lymington, a slow, tame stream in summer, invisible till you are close to it; but now, in flood, the trees that grow on its banks and hid it in summer are seen standing deep in a broad, rushing, noisy river.
the woodpecker's laugh has the same careless happy sound as in summer: it is scarcely light in the morning before the small wren pours out his sharp bright lyric outside my window; it is time, he tells me, to light my candle and get up. the starlings are about the house all day long, vocal even in the rain, carrying on their perpetual starling conversation—talk and song and recitative; a sort of bird-yiddish, with fluty fragments of melody stolen from the blackbird, and whistle and click and the music of the triangle thrown in to give variety. so mild is it that in the blackness of night i {4} sometimes wander into the forest paths and by furzy heaths and hedges to listen for the delicate shrill music of our late chirper in the thickets, our thamnotrizon, about which i shall write later; and look, too, for a late glow-worm shining in some wet green place. late in october i found one in daylight, creeping about in the grass on selborne hill; and some few, left unmarried, may shine much later. and as to the shade-loving grasshopper or leaf cricket, he sings, we know, on mild evenings in november. but i saw no green lamp in the herbage, and i heard only that nightly music of the tawny owl, fluting and hallooing far and near, bird answering bird in the oak woods all along the swollen stream from brockenhurst to boldre.
this race of wood owls perhaps have exceptionally strong voices: wise, in his book on the new forest, says that their hooting can be heard on a still autumn evening a distance of two miles. i have no doubt they can be heard a good mile.
a house by the boldre
but it is of this, to a bird lover, delectable spot in the best bird-months of april, may, and june that i have to write. the house, too, that gave me shelter must be spoken of; for never have i known any human habitation, in a land where people are discovered dwelling in so many secret, green, out-of-the-world places, which had so much of nature in and about it. grown-up and young people were in it, and children too, but they were girls, and had always quite spontaneously practised what i had preached—pet nothing and persecute nothing. there {5} was no boy to disturb the wild creatures with his hunting instincts and loud noises; no dog, no cat, nor any domestic creature except the placid cows and fowls which supplied the household with milk and eggs. a small old picturesque red-brick house with high-pitched roof and tall chimneys, a great part of it overrun with ivy and creepers, the walls and tiled roof stained by time and many-coloured lichen to a richly variegated greyish red. the date of the house, cut in a stone tablet in one of the rooms, was 1692. in front there was no lawn, but a walled plot of ground with old, once ornamental trees and bushes symmetrically placed—yews, both spreading and cypress-shaped irish yew, and tall tapering juniper, and arbor vit?; it was a sort of formal garden which had long thrown off its formality. in a corner of the ground by the side of these dark plants were laurel, syringa, and lilac bushes, and among these such wildings as thorn, elder and bramble had grown up, flourishing greatly, and making of that flowery spot a tangled thicket. at the side of the house there was another plot of ground, grass-grown, which had once been the orchard, and still had a few ancient apple and pear trees, nearly past bearing, with good nesting-holes for the tits and starlings in their decayed mossy trunks. there were also a few old ivied shade-trees—chestnuts, fir, and evergreen oak.
best of all (for the birds) were the small old half-ruined outhouses which had remained from the distant days when the place, originally a manor, {6} had been turned into a farm-house. they were here and there, scattered about, outside the enclosure, ivy-grown, each looking as old and weather-stained and in harmony with its surroundings as the house itself—the small tumble-down barns, the cow-sheds, the pig-house, the granary with open door and the wooden staircase falling to pieces. all was surrounded by old oak woods, and the river was close by. it was an ideal spot for small birds. i have never in england seen so many breeding close together. the commoner species were extraordinarily abundant. chaffinch and greenfinch; blackbird, throstle and missel-thrush; swallow and martin, and common and lesser whitethroat; garden warbler and blackcap; robin, dunnock, wren, flycatcher, pied wagtail, starling, and sparrow;—one could go round and put one's hand into half a dozen nests of almost any of these species. and very many of them had become partial to the old buildings: even in closed rooms where it was nearly dark, not only wrens, robins, tits, and wagtails, but blackbirds and throstles and chaffinches were breeding, building on beams and in or on the old nests of swallows and martins. the hawfinch and bullfinch were also there, the last rearing its brood within eight yards of the front door. one of his two nearest neighbours was a gold-crested wren. when the minute bird was sitting on her eggs, in her little cradle-nest suspended to a spray of the yew, every day i would pull the branch down so that we might all enjoy the sight of the little fairy bird in her fairy nest which she refused to quit. the {7} other next-door neighbour of the bullfinch was the long-tailed tit, which built its beautiful little nest on a terminal spray of another yew, ten or twelve yards from the door; and this small creature would also let us pull the branch down and peep into her well-feathered interior.
abundance of nests
it seemed that, from long immunity from persecution, all these small birds had quite lost their fear of human beings; but in late may and in june, when many young birds were out of the nest, one had to walk warily in the grass for fear of putting a foot on some little speckled creature patiently waiting to be visited and fed by its parents.
nor were there birds only. little beasties were also quite abundant; but they were of species that did no harm (at all events there), and the weasel would come from time to time to thin them down. money is paid to mole-catcher and rat-catcher; the weasel charges you nothing: he takes it out in kind. and even as the jungle tiger, burning bright, and the roaring lion strike with panic the wild cattle and antelopes and herds of swine, so does this miniature carnivore, this fairy tiger of english homesteads and hedges, fill with trepidation the small deer he hunts and slays with his needle teeth—nature's scourge sent out among her too prolific small rodents; her little blood-letter who relieves her and restores the balance. and therefore he, too, with his flat serpent head and fiery killing soul, is a "dear" creature, being, like the poet's web-footed beasts of an earlier epoch, "part of a general plan."
{8}
the most abundant of the small furred creatures were the two short-tailed voles—field-vole and bank-vole; the last, in his bright chestnut-red, the prettiest. whenever i sat down for a few minutes in the porch i would see one or more run across the stones from one side, where masses of periwinkle grew against the house, to the other side, where virginia creeper, rose, and an old magnolia tree covered the wall. one day at the back of the house by the scullery door i noticed a swaying movement in a tall seeded stem of dock, and looking down spied a wee harvest-mouse running and climbing nimbly on the slender branchlets, feeding daintily on the seed, and looking like a miniature squirrel on a miniature bush.
just there, close to the door, was a wood-pile, and the hornets had made their nest in it. the year before they had made it in a loft in the house, and before that in the old barn. the splendid insects were coming and going all day, interfering with nobody and nobody interfering with them; and when i put a plate of honey for them on the logs close to their entrance they took no notice of it; but by-and-by bank-voles and wood-mice came stealing out from among the logs and fed on it until it was all gone.
i was surprised, and could only suppose that the hornets did not notice or discover the honey, because no such good thing was looked for so close to their door. away from home the hornet was quick to discover anything sweet to the taste, and very ready to resent the presence of any other creature at the table.
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hornet and bank-vole
at the riverside, a few hundred yards from the house, i was sitting in the shade of a large elm tree one day when i was visited by a big hornet, who swept noisily down and settled on the trunk, four or five feet above the ground. a quantity of sap had oozed out into a deep cleft of the rough bark and had congealed there, and the hornet had discovered it. before he had been long feeding on it i saw a little bank-vole come out from the roots of the tree and run up the trunk, looking very pretty in his bright chestnut fur as he came into the sunlight. stealing up to the lower end of the cleft full of thickened sap he too began feeding on it. the hornet, who was at the upper end of the cleft, quite four inches apart from the vole, at once stopped eating and regarded the intruder for some time, then advanced towards him in a threatening attitude. the vole was frightened at this, starting and erecting his hair, and once or twice he tried to recover his courage and resume his feeding, but the hornet still keeping up his hostile movements, he eventually slipped quietly down and hid himself at the roots. when the hornet departed he came out again and went to the sap.
wishing to see more, i spent most of that day and the day following at the spot, and saw hornet and vole meet many times. if the vole was at the sap when the hornet came he was at once driven off, and when the hornet was there first the vole was never allowed to feed, although on every occasion he tried to do so, stealing to his lower place in the {10} gentlest way in order not to give offence, and after beginning to feed affecting not to see that the other had left off eating, and with raised head was regarding him with jealous eyes.
rarely have i looked on a prettier little comedy in wild life.
but to return to the house. there was quite a happy family at that spot by the back door where the hornets were. a numerous family of shrews were reared, and the young, when they began exploring the world, used to creep over the white stone by the threshold. the girls would pick them up to feel their soft mole-like fur: the young shrew is a gentle creature and does not attempt to bite. some of the more adventurous ones were always blundering into the empty flowerpots heaped against the wall, and there they would remain imprisoned until some person found and took them out.
one morning, at half-past four o'clock, when i was lying awake listening to the blackbird, a lively squirrel came dancing into the open window of my bedroom on the first floor. there were writing materials, flowers in glasses, and other objects on the ledge and dressing-table there, and he frisked about among them, chattering, wildly excited at seeing so many curious and pretty things, but he upset nothing; and by-and-by he danced out again into the ivy covering the wall on that side, throwing the colony of breeding sparrows into a great state of consternation.
drumming of woodpecker
the river was quite near the house—not half a {11} minute from the front door, though hidden from sight by the trees on its banks. here, at the nearest point, there was an old half-dead dwarf oak growing by the water and extending one horizontal branch a distance of twenty feet over the stream. this was the favourite drumming-tree of a green woodpecker, and at intervals through the day he would visit it and drum half a dozen times or so. this drumming sounded so loud that, following the valley down, i measured the distance it could be heard and found it just one-third of a mile. at that distance i could hear it distinctly; farther on, not at all. it seemed almost incredible that the sound produced by so small a stick as a woodpecker's beak striking a tree should be audible at that distance.
it is hardly to be doubted that the drumming is used as a love-call, though it is often heard in late summer. it is, however, in early spring and in the breeding season that it is oftenest heard, and i have found that a good imitation of it will sometimes greatly excite the bird. the same bird may be heard drumming here, there, and everywhere in a wood or copse, the sound varying somewhat in character and strength according to the wood; but each bird as a rule has a favourite drumming-tree, and it probably angers him to hear another bird at the spot. on one occasion, finding that a very large, old, and apparently dying cedar in a wood was constantly used by the woodpecker, i went to the spot and imitated the sound. very soon the bird came and begun drumming against me, close by. {12} i responded, and again he drummed; and becoming more and more excited he flew close to me, and passing from tree to tree drummed at every spot he lighted on.
the other species have the same habit of drumming on one tree. i have noticed it in the small spotted, or banded, woodpecker; and have observed that invariably after he has drummed two or three times the female has come flying to him from some other part of the wood, and the two birds have then both together uttered their loud chirping notes and flown away.
on revisiting the spot a year after i had heard the green woodpecker drumming every day in the oak by the river, i found that he had forsaken it, and that close by, on the other side of the stream, a great spotted woodpecker had selected as his drumming-tree a very big elm growing on the bank. he drummed on a large dead branch about forty feet from the ground, and the sound he made was quite as loud as that of the green bird. it may be that the two big woodpeckers, who play equally well on the same instrument, are intolerant of one another's presence, and that in this case the spotted bird had driven the larger yaffle from his territory.
our handsomest bird
one of the prettiest spots by the water was that very one where the spotted bird was accustomed to come, and i often went there at noon and sat for an hour on the grassy bank in the shade of the drumming-tree. the river was but thirty to forty feet wide at that spot, with masses of water forget-me-not growing on the opposite bank, clearly reflected {13} in the sherry-coloured sunlit current below. the trees were mostly oaks, in the young vivid green of early june foliage. and one day when the sky, seen through that fresh foliage, was without a stain of vapour in its pure azure, when the wood was full of clear sunlight—so clear that silken spider webs, thirty or forty feet high in the oaks, were visible as shining red and blue and purple lines—the bird, after drumming high above my head, flew to an oak tree just before me, and clinging vertically to the bark on the high part of the trunk, remained there motionless for some time. his statuesque attitude, as he sat with his head thrown well back, the light glinting on his hard polished feathers, black and white and crimson, the setting in which he appeared of greenest translucent leaves and hoary bark and open sunlit space, all together made him seem not only our handsomest woodpecker, but our most beautiful bird. i had seen him at his best, and sitting there motionless amid the wind-fluttered leaves, he was like a bird-figure carved from some beautiful vari-coloured stone.
the most interesting events in animal life observed at this spot relate to the cuckoo in the spring of 1900. some time before this dr. alfred russel wallace said, in the course of a talk we had, that he very much wanted me to find out exactly what happened in a nest in which a young cuckoo was hatched. it was, i replied, an old, old story—what could i see, supposing i was lucky enough to find a nest where i {14} could observe it properly, more than jenner, hancock, mrs. hugh blackburn, and perhaps other writers, had told us? yes, it was an old story, he said, and he wanted it told again by someone else. people had lately been discrediting jenner's account, and as to the other chief authority i had named, one writer, a dr. creighton, had said, "as for artists like mrs. blackburn, they can draw what they please—all out of their own brains: we can't trust them, or such as them." sober-minded naturalists had come to regard the habit and abnormal strength attributed to the newly-hatched cuckoo as "not proven" or quite incredible; thus seebohm had said, "one feels inclined to class these narratives with the equally well-authenticated stories of ghosts and other apparitions which abound."
since my conversation with dr. wallace we have had more of these strange narratives—the fables and ghost stories which the unbelievers are compelled in the end to accept—and all that dr. jenner or his assistant saw others have seen, and some observers have even taken snapshots of the young cuckoo in the act of ejecting his fellow-nestling. but it appears from all the accounts which i have so far read, that in every case the observer was impatient and interfered in the business by touching and irritating the young cuckoo, by putting eggs and other objects on his back, and by making other experiments. in the instance i am about to give there was no interference by me or by the others who at intervals watched with me.
{15}
a cuckoo in a robin's nest
a robin's nest with three robin's eggs and one of the cuckoo was found in a low bank at the side of the small orchard on 19th may, 1900. the bird was incubating, and on the afternoon of 27th may the cuckoo hatched out. unfortunately i did not know how long incubation had been going on before the 19th, but from the fact that the cuckoo was first out, it seems probable that the parasite has this further advantage of coming first from the shell. long ago i found that this was so in the case of the parasitical troupials of the genus molothrus in south america.
i kept a close watch on the nest for the rest of that afternoon and the whole of the following day (the 28th), during which the young cuckoo was lying in the bottom of the nest, helpless as a piece of jelly with a little life in it, and with just strength enough in his neck to lift his head and open his mouth; and then, after a second or two, the wavering head would drop again. at eight o'clock next morning (29th), i found that one robin had come out of the shell, and one egg had been ejected and was lying a few inches below the nest on the sloping bank. yet the young cuckoo still appeared a weak, helpless, jelly-like creature, as on the previous day. but he had increased greatly in size. i believe that in forty-eight hours from the time of hatching he had quite doubled his bulk, and had grown darker, his naked skin being of a bluish-black colour. the robin, thirty or more hours younger, was little more than half his size, and had a pale, pinkish-yellow {16} skin, thinly clothed with a long black down. the cuckoo occupied the middle of the deep, cup-shaped nest, and his broad back, hollow in the middle, formed a sort of false bottom; but there was a small space between the bird's sides and the nest, and in this space or interstice the one unhatched egg that still remained and the young robin were lying.
during this day (29th) i observed that the pressure of the egg and young robin against his sides irritated the cuckoo: he was continually moving, jerking and wriggling his lumpish body this way and that, as if to get away from the contact. at intervals this irritation would reach its culminating point, and a series of mechanical movements would begin, all working blindly but as surely towards the end as if some devilish intelligence animated the seemingly helpless infant parasite.
of the two objects in the nest the unhatched egg irritated him the most. the young robin was soft, it yielded when pressed, and could be made somehow to fit into the interstice; but the hard, round shell, pressing against him like a pebble, was torture to him, and at intervals became unendurable. then would come that magical change in him, when he seemed all at once to become possessed of a preternatural power and intelligence, and then the blind struggle down in the nest would begin. and after each struggle—each round it might be called—the cuckoo would fall back again and lie in a state of collapse, as if the mysterious virtue had gone out of him. but in a very short time the pressure on his {17} side would begin again to annoy him, then to torment him, and at last he would be wrought up to a fresh effort. thus in a space of eight minutes i saw him struggle four separate times, with a period of collapse after each, to get rid of the robin's egg; and each struggle involved a long series of movements on his part. on each of these occasions the egg was pushed or carried up to the wrong or upper side of the nest, with the result that when the bird jerked the egg from him it rolled back into the bottom of the nest. the statement is therefore erroneous that the cuckoo knows at which side to throw the egg out. of course he knows nothing, and, as a fact, he tries to throw the egg up as often as down the slope.
the process in each case was as follows: the pressure of the egg against the cuckoo's side, as i have said, was a constant irritation; but the irritability varied in degree in different parts of the body. on the under parts it scarcely existed; its seat was chiefly on the upper surface, beginning at the sides and increasing towards the centre, and was greatest in the hollow of the back. when, in moving, the egg got pushed up to the upper edge of his side, he would begin to fidget more and more, and this would cause it to move round, and so to increase the irritation by touching and pressing against other parts. when all the bird's efforts to get away from the object had only made matters worse, he would cease wriggling and squat down lower and lower in the bottom of the nest, and the egg, forced up, would finally roll right into the cavity in his back—the {18} most irritable part of all. whenever this occurred, a sudden change that was like a fit would seize the bird; he would stiffen, rise in the nest, his flabby muscles made rigid, and stand erect, his back in a horizontal position, the head hanging down, the little naked wings held up over the back. in that position he looked an ugly, lumpish negro mannikin, standing on thinnest dwarf legs, his back bent, and elbows stuck up above the hollow flat back.
once up on his small stiffened legs he would move backwards, firmly grasping the hairs and hair-like fibres of the nest-lining, and never swerving, until the rim of the cup-like structure was reached; and then standing, with feet sometimes below and in some cases on the rim, he would jerk his body, throwing the egg off or causing it to roll off. after that he would fall back into the nest and lie quite exhausted for some time, his jelly-like body rising and falling with his breathing.
these changes in the bird strongly reminded me of a person with an epileptic fit, as i had been accustomed to see it on the pampas, where, among the gauchos, epilepsy is one of the commonest maladies;—the sudden rigidity of muscle in some weak, sickly, flabby-looking person, the powerful grip of the hand, the strength in struggling, exceeding that of a man in perfect health, and finally, when this state is over, the weakness of complete exhaustion.
i witnessed several struggles with the egg, but at last, in spite of my watchfulness, i did not see it ejected. on returning after a very short absence, {19} i found the egg had been thrown out and had rolled down the bank, a distance of fourteen inches from the nest.
the young cuckoo appeared to rest more quietly in the nest now, but after a couple of hours the old fidgeting began again, and increased until he was in the same restless state as before. the rapid growth of the birds made the position more and more miserable for the cuckoo, since the robin, thrust against the side of the nest, would throw his head and neck across the cuckoo's back, and he could not endure being touched there. and now a fresh succession of struggles began, the whole process being just the same as when the egg was struggled with. but it was not so easy with the young bird, not because of its greater weight, but because it did not roll like the egg and settle in the middle of the back; it would fall partly on to the cuckoo's back and then slip off into the nest again. but success came at last, after many failures. the robin was lying partly across the cuckoo's neck, when, in moving its head, its little curved beak came down and rested on the very centre of that irritable hollow in the back of its foster-brother. instantly the cuckoo pressed down into the nest, shrinking away as if hot needles had pricked him, as far as possible from the side where the robin was lying against him, and this movement of course brought the robin more and more over him, until he was thrown right upon the cuckoo's back.
instantly the rigid fit came on, and up rose the cuckoo, as if the robin weighed no more than a feather {20} on him; and away backwards he went, right up the nest, without a pause, and standing actually on the rim, jerked his body, causing the robin to fall off, clean away from the nest. it fell, in fact, on to a large dock leaf five inches below the rim of the nest, and rested there.
after getting rid of his burden the cuckoo continued in the same position, perfectly rigid, for a space of five or six seconds, during which it again and again violently jerked its body, as if it had the feeling of the burden on it still. then, the fit over, it fell back, exhausted as usual.
i had been singularly fortunate in witnessing the last scene and conclusion of this little bloodless tragedy in a bird's nest, with callow nestlings for dramatis person?, this innocent crime and wrong, which is not a wrong since the cuckoo doesn't think it one. it is a little curious to reflect that a similar act takes place annually in tens of thousands of small birds' nests all over the country, and that it is so rarely witnessed.
marvellous as the power of the young cuckoo is when the fit is on him, it is of course limited, and when watching his actions i concluded that it would be impossible for him to eject eggs and nestlings from any thrush's nest. the blackbird's would be too deep, and as to the throstle's, he could not move backwards up the sides of the cup-like cavity on account of the smooth plastered surface.
after having seen the young robin cast out i still refrained from touching the nest, as there were yet {21} other things to observe. one was the presence, very close to the nest, of the ejected nestling—what would the parents do in the case? before dealing with that matter i shall conclude the history of the young cuckoo.
having got the nest to himself he rested very quietly, and it was not till the following day (1st july) that i allowed myself to touch him. he was, i found, still irritable, and when i put back the eggs he had thrown out he was again miserable in the nest, and the struggle with the eggs was renewed until he got rid of them as before. the next day the irritability had almost gone, and in the afternoon he suffered an egg or a pebble to remain in the nest with him without jerking and wriggling about, and he made no further attempt to eject it. this observation—the loss of irritability on the fifth day after hatching—agrees with that of mr. craig, whose account was printed in the feathered world, 14th july, 1899.
the young cuckoo grew rapidly and soon trod his nest into a broad platform, on which he reposed, a conspicuous object in the scanty herbage on the bank. we often visited and fed him, when he would puff up his plumage and strike savagely at our hands, but at the same time he would always gobble down the food we offered. in seventeen days after being hatched he left the nest and took up his position in an oak tree growing on the bank, and there the robins continued feeding him for the next three days, after which we saw no more of him.
{22}
i may add that in may 1901 a pair of robins built on the bank close to where the nest had been made the previous year, and that in this nest a cuckoo was also reared. the bird, when first seen, was apparently about four or five days old, and it had the nest to itself. three ejected robin's eggs were lying on the bank a little lower down.
it is hardly to be doubted that the robins were the same birds that had reared the cuckoo in the previous season; and it is highly probable that the same cuckoo had returned to place her egg in their nest.
the end of the little history—the fate of the ejected nestling and the attitude of the parent robins—remains to be told. when the young cuckoo throws out the nestlings from nests in trees, hedges, bushes, and reeds, the victims, as a rule, fall some distance to the ground, or in the water, and are no more seen by the old birds. here the young robin, when ejected, fell a distance of but five or six inches, and rested on a broad, bright green leaf, where it was an exceedingly conspicuous object; and when the mother robin was on the nest—and at this stage she was on it a greater part of the time—warming that black-skinned, toad-like, spurious babe of hers, her bright, intelligent eyes were looking full at the other one, just beneath her, which she had grown in her body and had hatched with her warmth, and was her very own. i watched her for hours; watched her when warming the cuckoo, when she left the nest and when she returned with food, and warmed it again, and never {23} once did she pay the least attention to the outcast lying there so close to her. there, on its green leaf, it remained, growing colder by degrees, hour by hour, motionless, except when it lifted its head as if to receive food, then dropped it again, and when, at intervals, it twitched its body as if trying to move. during the evening even these slight motions ceased, though that feeblest flame of life was not yet extinguished; but in the morning it was dead and cold and stiff; and just above it, her bright eyes on it, the mother robin sat on the nest as before, warming her cuckoo.
how amazing and almost incredible it seems that a being such as a robin, intelligent above most birds as we are apt to think, should prove in this instance to be a mere automaton! the case would, i think, have been different if the ejected one had made a sound, since there is nothing which more excites the parent bird, or which is more instantly responded to, than the cry of hunger or distress of the young. but at this early stage the nestling is voiceless—another point in favour of the parasite. the sight of its young, we see, slowly and dumbly dying, touches no chord in the parent: there is, in fact, no recognition; once out of the nest it is no more than a coloured leaf, or a bird-shaped pebble, or fragment of clay.
it happened that my young fellow-watchers, seeing that the ejected robin if left there would inevitably perish, proposed to take it in to feed and rear it—to save it, as they said; but i advised them not to {24} attempt such a thing, but rather to spare the bird. to spare it the misery they would inflict upon it by attempting to fill its parents' place. they had, so far, never kept a caged bird, nor a pet bird, and had no desire to keep one; all they desired to do in this case was to save the little outcast from death—to rear it till it was able to fly away and take care of itself. that was a difficult, a well-nigh impossible task. the bird, at this early stage, required to be fed at short intervals for about sixteen hours each day on a peculiar kind of food, suited to its delicate stomach—chiefly small caterpillars found in the herbage; and it also needed a sufficient amount by day and night of that animal warmth which only the parent bird could properly supply. they, not being robins, would give it unsuitable food, feed it at improper times, and not keep it at the right temperature, with the almost certain result that after lingering a few days it would die in their hands. but if by giving a great deal of time and much care they should succeed in rearing it, their foundling would start his independent life so handicapped, weakened in constitution by an indoor artificial bringing up, without the training which all young birds receive from their parents after quitting the nest, that it would be impossible for him to save himself. if by chance he should survive until august, he would then be set upon and killed by one of the adult robins already in possession of the ground. now, when a bird at maturity perishes, it suffers in dying—sometimes very acutely; but if left to grow {25} cold and fade out of life at this stage it can hardly be said to suffer. it is no more conscious than a chick in the shell; take from it the warmth that keeps it in being, and it drops back into nothingness without knowing and, we may say, without feeling anything. there may indeed be an incipient consciousness in that small, soft brain in its early vegetative stage, a first faint glimmer of bright light to be, and a slight sensation of numbness may be actually felt as the body grows cold, but that would be all.
mistaken kindness
pain is so common in the world; and, owing to the softness and sensitiveness induced in us by an indoor artificial life—since that softness of our bodies reacts on our minds—we have come to a false or an exaggerated idea of its importance, its painfulness, to put it that way; and we should therefore be but making matters worse, or rather making ourselves more miserable, by looking for and finding it where it does not exist.
the power to feel pain in any great degree comes into the bird's life after this transitional period, and is greatest at maturity, when consciousness and all the mental faculties are fully developed, particularly the passion of fear, which plays continually on the strings of the wild creature's heart with an ever varying touch, producing the feeling in all degrees from the slight disquiet, which is no sooner come than gone, to extremities of agonising terror. it would perhaps have a wholesome effect on their young minds, and save them from grieving over-much at the death of a newly-hatched robin, if they {26} would consider this fact of the pain that is and must be. not the whole subject—the fact that as things are designed in this world of sentient life there can be no good, no sweetness or pleasure in life, nor peace and contentment and safety, nor happiness and joy, nor any beauty or strength or lustre, nor any bright and shining quality of body or mind, without pain, which is not an accident nor an incident, nor something ancillary to life, but is involved in and a part of life, of its very colour and texture. that would be too long to speak about; all i meant was to consider that small part of the fact, the necessary pain to and destruction of the bird life around them and in the country generally.
annual bird-mortality
here, for instance, without going farther than a hundred yards from the house in any direction, they could put their hands in nests in trees and bushes, and on the ground, and in the ivy, and in the old outhouse, and handle and count about one hundred and thirty young birds not yet able to fly. probably more than twice that number would be successfully reared during the season. how many, then, would be reared in the whole parish! how many in the entire new forest district, in the whole county of hampshire, in the entire kingdom! yet when summer came round again they would find no more birds than they had now. and so it would be in all places; all that incalculable increase would have perished. many millions would be devoured by rapacious birds and beasts; millions more would perish of hunger and cold; millions of migrants would fall by the {27} way, some in the sea and some on land; those that returned from distant regions would be but a remnant, and the residents that survived through the winter, these, too, would be nothing but a remnant. it is not only that this inconceivable amount of bird life must be destroyed each year, but we cannot suppose that death is not a painful process. in a vast majority of cases, whether the bird slowly perishes of hunger and weakness, or is pursued and captured by birds and beasts of prey, or is driven by cold adverse winds and storms into the waves, the pain, the agony must be great. the least painful death is undoubtedly that of the bird that, weakened by want of sustenance, dies by night of cold in severe weather. it is indeed most like the death of the nestling, but a few hours out of the shell, which has been thrown out of the nest, and which soon grows cold, and dozes its feeble, unconscious life away.
we may say, then, that of all the thousand forms of death which nature has invented to keep her too rapidly multiplying creatures within bounds, that which is brought about by the singular instinct of the young cuckoo in the nest is the most merciful or the least painful.
i am not sure that i said all this, or marshalled fact and argument in the precise order in which they are here set down. i fancy not, as it seems more than could well have been spoken while we were standing there in the late evening sunlight by that primrose bank, looking down on the little {28} flesh-coloured mite in its scant clothing of black down, fading out of life on its cold green leaf. but what was said did not fail of its effect, so that my young tender-hearted hearers, who had begun to listen with moist eyes, secretly accusing me perhaps of want of feeling, were content in the end to let it be—to go away and leave it to its fate in that mysterious green world we, too, live in and do not understand, in which life and death and pleasure and pain are interwoven light and shade.
