The grandest sight of the day, when the homeward flight is at its maximum, usually comes during the hour before sunset. From some point far away the birds make a bee line for the center of their island, but, as they near their destination, they invariably skirt the shores so as to come down across the wind. The instinct of following a leader is evidently strong; if, for any reason, a file is broken, and the rear birds turn toward the left coast instead of the right, those behind will obey the signal and all swing into the new course. Close over gulches and ridges of their home island the oncoming streams of birds flow, the separate “rivulets” cutting across each other like the blades of scissors. At the same time these files also rise and fall in beautiful undulations which can best be seen from the crest of a hill above them. Sometimes three or more such lines will flow along for a while ten or fifteen yards apart, but sooner or later one of them will make leeway until two files interweave. Then the soft, humming swish of wings is interjected with sharp clicks as the quills of two guanayes strike together in air. When one beholds the endless mingling, the crossing and recrossing and tangling of the lines, it seems incredible that more birds do not clash.
IX
RICHARD JEFFERIES
IN THE fine old stone house of Coate Farm, near Swindon in Wiltshire, was born in 1848 John Richard, to gentleman Farmer Jefferies and his town wife, Elizabeth. From her, Richard Jefferies received, perhaps, his refinement and his love of books and poetry, his delicate hands that unsuited him to farm work from the first, and the delicate health that flawed all his happiness, tinged his writings with melancholy and heightened them with a sense of the briefness and beauty of life, and that finally destroyed him. From his father came his love of the country, the passion for bodily activity, the stomach that is required of a poet to be in childhood a ruthless robber of birds’ nests and in boyhood an addicted hunter. His father early taught him to observe. He trained the lad’s eyes and ears all day and every day, sharpening his sensitivity toward Nature until it was keen as his spaniel’s nose, and wary as the wild duck’s ears. Had he set out to make his son a poet of Nature this father could have done little better.
As it was, Coate Farm was already far too full of books on chivalry and magic, to make a good peasant of this boy. And the Jefferies family was moving on the predestined road of most of the English agricultural stock—off the land. This exodus might have been forced on them in any case; it was hastened by the fact that Richard’s father was himself overeducated for his station. Absorbed in breeding fine strains of garden flowers, and raising specimen pears on the trees trained against the sunny wall, he neglected oats and barley. So, while their more illiterate neighbors drifted to the industrial centers, or emigrated to America, the Jefferies family relinquished their land acre by acre, dooming the house with debt.
Young Richard was remembered by his father’s farm hands and dairy maids as a leggy, pale boy, with enormous blue eyes and a large, passionate mouth, who never did any work about the place as long as he could lie on a haycock and watch, under a shading hand, the ascending lark. When it was haying time, Dick was shooting moor hens; when it was plowing time he was studying sand martins nesting in the old quarry bank. When it was lesson time he was talking to one of those ragged girls that must have given him the memorable and pathetic character of “Lou” in Bevis. When the day was beautiful, he let all its gold spill by while he shut himself up, with his head drooping into a book of curious natural lore. He did nothing that the yeomanry could approve or understand, except for his skating. On the ice, the delicate, idle boy became a whirling snowflake whom no one could overtake.
The Wiltshire downs are at their loveliest about Coate Farm; they have breadth and wildness, contrasted with lowland Wiltshire, a heavy-soiled, too umbrageous dairy country with a bovine peasantry. On the windy downs the boy made his first acquaintance with bird life (unless the nesting of the house martins under the eaves and of the swallows in the chimney stacks preceded it). And there, in hedgerow and grass, he learned the ways of birds as only a curious and rather marauding country boy can know them. The great reservoir, that figures so delightfully in Bevis, that classic of boyhood, gave him moor hens and wild ducks, herons and crested grebes and divers. And Savernake Forest, full ten miles distant, was his regular walk. Hudson mentions it as the finest haunt for daws in all of England.
Precocious in everything, Richard fell in love early with his young cousin, the daughter of Day House Farm, across the down. She is, I think, the luscious Frances of Bevis, and the girlish heroine of Amaryllis at the Fair. They married improvidently, had a baby with the promptness of any country couple—and responsibilities, anxieties, poverty, and confinement were at once upon the young man. Newspaper work was the only sort of employment fitted to him which he could secure, and Jefferies was drawn into the maelstrom of Fleet Street. Reporting, editorial work, and hasty nature sketches designed to give the city-pent man a breath of the open air, were all the training, as a writer, that Jefferies ever had. He took a suburban “villa” in Surbiton, with a tiny yard around it, and suburban souls around his own. Between Fleet Street and the Surbiton house most of the rest of his life moved in a dutiful round.
What sort of Nature writing could come out of this? one may ask. But it must be remembered that Jefferies was a poet, and there is nothing so good for poetry as discontent, as idleness and joy remembered, as Nature passionately longed for, as pictures of childhood very far off and long ago, dancing bright before the eyes. Jefferies poured out his love of Nature like a caged blackbird, singing, in his unsatisfied desire, every month of the year, whereas it is probable that had he possessed the means to remain a country squire he would have gone on shooting pheasants and rabbits, as voicelessly as his ancestors had done for generations.
His first magazine articles to attract attention were a ringing if inconsistent defense of the English yeomanry whom he loved with passion, especially its children and young girls, though he loved them squire-fashion, not as one of them. Sheer Nature essays followed—very rambling at first, evocative and reminiscent. Many references to birds occur in them, but nothing one may lift from the general tissue of his deep poetic communion with Nature. Finally, having exhausted his Wiltshire notes, he turned his attention to Nature near London. As he truly observes, there is a denser bird population in the suburbs than in the country. He had never heard in Wiltshire so rapturous a morning chorus as the Maytime symphony of missel thrush and blackbird, cuckoo and nightingale about Surbiton.
Jefferies’ life would now seem to have been well on the way toward fame, perhaps even financial security, if not happiness. But the forgotten flaw was in his destiny. A family weakness, developed in him, no doubt, by gruelling London work, poverty and neglect of the body, doomed him to tuberculosis. It invaded organ after organ; the record of his operations, his nervous destruction, his laboring breath, is almost unreadable. He dictated his work to his wife in a whisper. Yet that work was the crowning achievement of his life. To this period belong Bevis (which my boy children read and read again as I did when little) and Amaryllis, as well as his introduction to The Natural History of Selborne, and the two books of his finest, most mature Nature essays, from which selection is here made, The Life of the Fields (1884), and Nature Near London (1883). Jefferies, who loved health, adored the wild wind and the bold children of the downs, ripe fruit on sunny walls, young country women in their flower, young men in their strength at the plow and among beasts, sank, fighting, inch by inch, within the pall of London’s smoke. He was like a song bird in a reeking coal chimney out of which he could find no escape. Even his last despairing cries were song—since a poet, like a bird, can scarcely utter any other note.
The selection called Round a London Copse is not without pathos, for it shows what Jefferies could do with what he was forced to accept as Nature. The copse was a bit of the wild left over by the growing suburb, right down his street. (Even that is gone today, I understand.) Now, it is easy enough to tell a rousing tale
if you happen to have had adventures with Andean condors, crested screamers, grey sea eagles, lyre birds or wild ostriches. It is a great deal harder to do anything with our common small sweet songsters of the civilized world, as I can assure the reader from having sought through hundreds of pages for just such material as this of Jefferies’. Many writers fail at it; among English authors only Hudson does as well as Jefferies. Jefferies, whose fate it was never to travel, even in so small a country as England, extracted the last sweetness from the little that he ever saw.
I am not proposing Jefferies as a great ornithologist, or even an amateur ornithologist in high scientific standing. Of scientific training or even attitude he was almost devoid. His only chance of overcoming this handicap (which he never realized) was to teach himself by the most minute, prolonged attention to bird behavior. And this his seemingly idle childhood and youth supplied him. How long, and how thoughtfully, he must have watched the soaring of birds one can judge from this specimen of his prose.
For the soaring of birds—rising abruptly and for a long time against gravity, without a single flap of the wings—seems to contradict all the laws of mechanics. More than one physicist has been quite unable to explain it; most of the explanations are so involved and wordy that after one has read and seemingly understood them, one cannot remember a word of the exposition or repeat even the principles involved. Jefferies may not have here the perfect or complete explanation, but it is the most concise and vivid that I know. It exhibits his style as it ought always to have been, had he had time to polish and select; it shows what a fine ornithologist he would have become if Fate had not wasted the privileges of bird watching upon so many who are blind and had instead conferred them for life upon the dreaming boy of Coate Farm, and the weary night commuter to Surbiton.
ROUND A LONDON COPSE
IN OCTOBER a party of wood-pigeons took up their residence in the little copse. It stands in the angle formed by two suburban roads, and the trees in it overshadow some villa gardens. This copse has always been a favourite with birds, and it is not uncommon to see a pheasant about it, sometimes within gunshot of the garden, while the call of the partridges in the evening may now and then be heard from the windows. But though frequently visited by wood-pigeons, they did not seem to make any stay till now when this party arrived.
There were eight of them. During the day they made excursions into the stubble fields, and in the evening returned to roost. They remained through the winter, which will be remembered as the most severe for many years. Even in the sharpest frost, if the sun shone out, they called to each other now and then.
At intervals the note of the wood-pigeon was heard in the adjacent house from October, all through the winter, till the nesting time in May. Sometimes towards sunset in the early spring they all perched together before finally retiring on the bare, slender tips of the tall birch trees, exposed and clearly visible against the sky.
Six once alighted in a row on a long birch branch, bending it down with their weight like a heavy load of fruit. The stormy sunset flamed up, tinting the fields with momentary red, and their hollow voices sounded among the trees. By May they had paired off, and each couple had a part of the copse to themselves. Instead of avoiding the house, they seemed, on the contrary, to come much nearer, and two or three couples built close to the garden.
These pigeons were new inhabitants; but turtle-doves had built in the copse since I knew it. They were late coming the last spring I watched them; but, when they did, chose a spot much nearer the house than usual.
While this nesting was going on I could hear five different birds at once either in the garden or from any of the windows. The doves cooed, and every now and then their gentle tones were over-powered by the loud call of the wood-pigeons. A cuckoo called from the top of the tallest birch, and a nightingale and a brook-sparrow (or sedge-reedling) were audible together in the common on the opposite side of the road. It is remarkable that one season there seems more of one kind of bird than the next. The year alluded to, for instance, in this copse was the wood-pigeons’ year. But one season previously the copse seemed to belong to the missel-thrushes.
Early in the March mornings I used to wake as the workmen’s trains went rumbling by to the great City, to see on the ceiling by the window a streak of sunlight, tinted orange by the vapour through which the level beams had passed. Something in the sense of morning lifts the heart up to the sun. The light, the air, the waving branches speak; the earth and life seem boundless at that moment. In this it is the same on the verge of the artificial City as when the rays come streaming through the pure atmosphere of the Downs. While thus thinking, suddenly there rang out three clear, trumpetlike notes from a tree at the edge of the copse by the garden. A softer song followed, and then again the same three notes, whose wild sweetness echoed through the wood.
The voice of the missel-thrush sounded not only close at hand and in the room, but repeated itself as it floated away, as the bugle-call does. He is the trumpeter of spring: Lord of March, his proud call challenges the woods; there are none who can answer. Listen for the missel-thrush: when he sings the snow may fall, the rain drift, but not for long; the violets are near at hand. The nest was in a birch visible from the garden, and that season seemed to be the missel-thrush’s. Another year the cuckoos had possession.
There is a detached ash tree in the field by the copse; it stands apart, and about sixty or seventy yards from the garden. A cuckoo came to this ash every morning, and called there for an hour at a time, his notes echoing along the building, one following the other as wavelets roll on the summer sands. After a while two more used to appear, and then there was a chase round the copse, up to the tallest birch, and out to the ash tree again. This went on day after day, and was repeated every evening. Flying from the ash to the copse and returning, the birds were constantly in sight; they sometimes passed over the house, and the call became so familiar that it was not regarded any more than the chirp of a sparrow. Till the very last the cuckoos remained there, and never ceased to be heard till they left to cross the seas.
Even the starlings vary, regular as they are by habit. This season (1881) none have whistled on the house-top. In previous years they have always come, and only the preceding spring a pair filled the gutter with the materials of their nest. Long after they had finished a storm descended, and the rain, thus dammed up and unable to escape, flooded the corner. It cost half a sovereign to repair the damage, but it did not matter; the starlings had been happy.
Another time it was the season of the lapwings. Towards the end of November (1881), there appeared a large flock of peewits, or green plovers, which flock passed most of the day in a broad, level ploughed field of great extent. At this time I estimated their number as about four hundred; far exceeding any flock I had previously seen in the neighbourhood. Fresh parties joined the main body continually, until by December there could not have been less than a thousand. Still more and more arrived, and by the first of January (1882) even this number was doubled, and there were certainly fully two thousand there. It is the habit of green plovers to all move at once, to rise from the ground simultaneously, to turn in the air, or to descend—and all so regular that their very wings seem to flap together. The effect of such a vast body of white-breasted birds uprising as one from the dark ploughed earth was very remarkable.
When they passed overhead the air sang like the midsummer hum with the shrill noise of beating wings. When they wheeled a light shot down reflected from their white breasts, so that people involuntarily looked up to see what it could be. The sun shone on them, so that at a distance the flock resembled a cloud brilliantly illuminated. In an instant they turned and the cloud was darkened. Such a great flock had not been seen in that district in the memory of man.
Jays often come, magpies more rarely, to the copse; as for the lesser birds they all visit it. In the hornbeams at the verge blackcaps sing in spring a sweet and cultured song, which does not last many seconds. They visit a thick b
unch of ivy in the garden. By these hornbeam trees a streamlet flows out of the copse, crossed at the hedge by a pole, to prevent cattle straying in. The pole is a robin’s perch. He is always there, or near; he was there all through the terrible winter, all the summer, and he is there now.
There are a few inches, a narrow strip of sand, beside the streamlet under this pole. Whenever a wagtail dares to come to this sand the robin immediately appears and drives him away. He will bear no intrusion. A pair of butcher-birds built very near this spot one spring, but afterwards appeared to remove to a place where there is more furze, but beside the same hedge. The determination and fierce resolution of the shrike, or butcher-bird, despite his small size, is most marked. One day a shrike darted down from a hedge just before me, not a yard in front, and dashed a dandelion to the ground.
His claws clasped the stalk, and the flower was crushed in a moment; he came with such force as to partly lose his balance. His prey was probably a humble-bee which had settled on the dandelion. The shrike’s head resembles that of the eagle in miniature. From his favourite branch he surveys the grass, and in an instant pounces on his victim.
Up in the oaks blackbirds whistle—you do not often see them, for they seek the leafy top branches, but once now and then while fluttering across to another perch. The blackbird’s whistle is very human, like some one playing the flute; an uncertain player now drawing forth a bar of a beautiful melody and then losing it again. He does not know what quiver or what turn his note will take before it ends; the note leads him and completes itself. His music strives to express his keen appreciation of the loveliness of the days, the golden glory of the meadow, the light, and the luxurious shadows.
Such thoughts can only be expressed in fragments, like a sculptor’s chips thrown off as the inspiration seizes him, not mechanically sawn to a set line. Now and again the blackbird feels the beauty of the time, the large white daisy stars, the grass with yellow-dusted tips, the air which comes so softly unperceived by any precedent rustle of the hedge. He feels the beauty of the time, and he must say it. His notes come like wild flowers not sown in order. There is not an oak here in June without a blackbird.
A Gathering of Birds Page 13