A Gathering of Birds Read online

  Even so far north as icy Alaska, I have found my glad singer. When I was exploring the glaciers between Mount Fairweather and the Stikeen River, one cold day in November, after trying in vain to force a way through the innumerable icebergs of Sum Dum Bay to the great glaciers at the head of it, I was weary and baffled and sat resting in my canoe convinced at last that I would have to leave this part of my work for another year. Then I began to plan my escape to open water before the young ice which was beginning to form should shut me in. While I thus lingered drifting with the bergs, in the midst of these gloomy forebodings and all the terrible glacial desolation and grandeur, I suddenly heard the well-known whir of an Ouzel’s wings, and, looking up, saw my little comforter coming straight across the ice from the shore. In a second or two he was with me, flying three times round my head with a happy salute, as if saying, “Cheer up, old friend; you see I’m here, and all’s well.” Then he flew back to the shore, alighted on the topmost jag of a stranded iceberg, and began to nod and bow as though he were on one of his favorite boulders in the midst of a sunny Sierra cascade.

  Such, then, is our little cinclus, beloved of every one who is so fortunate as to know him. Tracing on strong wing every curve of the most precipitous torrents from one extremity of the Sierra to the other; not fearing to follow them through their darkest gorges and coldest snow-tunnels; acquainted with every waterfall, echoing their divine music; and throughout the whole of their beautiful lives interpreting all that we in our unbelief call terrible in the utterances of torrents and storms, as only varied expressions of God’s eternal love.

  III

  GILBERT WHITE

  THE facts in Gilbert White’s life can be very briefly told. Indeed there is little possibility of expanding them much beyond the following, for his eventlessly happy career was so intensely private that he entered scarcely at all into public notice, was known even to his friends chiefly by correspondence, and died almost unremarked by the world. Yet, as Prof. Alfred Newton, the editor of the famous Dictionary of Birds, has said, “It is almost certain that more than half the zoölogists of the British Islands for many years past have been infected with their love of the study by Gilbert White; and it can hardly be supposed that his influence will cease.”

  Gilbert White was born in 1720 in Selborne vicarage in Hampshire, and died in that hamlet in 1793. This makes him the contemporary of Linnaeus, Buffon, Haller, Lamarck; his life extended through the reigns of the first three Georges.

  His absences from Selborne were few. He went as a boy to school at Basingstoke, then to Oriel College at Oxford, where he remained for three post-graduate years, then became curate at Swarraton for a short time, returned to Oxford for three years as a junior proctor, and in 1755, being then thirty-five years of age, he settled down in Selborne again there to remain for thirty-three years.

  White was not, I understand, the vicar of Selborne at all; it was his grandfather, of the same name, who held that modest post. White was more modest even than that. Though ordained, he never practised his calling in Selborne, unless perhaps to assist in the duties of the real curate during absences. So that even from ministering to the village folk and rustics he was aloof. With an assured income, with a modest but beautiful old-world home in the village, without wife or child (and having no apparent desire for them), his time was completely his own—or, rather, his time was the birds’.

  To the modern temper this is well-nigh annoying. But he is to be judged by his times, and his class, and his training. We owe to his leisure, his tastes and his habits, a life work which has set many of us upon the road both to the art and science of bird watching, and to a love of Nature in its intimate aspects. We must not quarrel with the times, or the man, but try to understand both.

  As for the man, Grant Allen has said that he seems perfectly to exemplify Austin Dobson’s lines on an eighteenth century gentleman:

  He liked the well-wheel’s creaking tongue—

  He liked the thrush that stopped and sung—

  He liked the drone of flies among

  His netted peaches;

  He liked to watch the sunlight fall

  Athwart his ivied orchard wall;

  Or pause to catch the cuckoo’s call

  Beyond the beeches.

  To this picture there is something in every contemplative soul that responds. We feel that Gilbert White lived for us the life of delicate appreciation of simple and beautiful things, that we may not have and would not, for our restlessness, be able to maintain for some seventy-odd years if we had the opportunity. Here was a man who picked up acorns and put them in his pocket so as to be able to press one into the ground where, it seemed to him, an oak should grow. Here was a man who saw English Nature as Constable saw it—firm-rooted, deep-breasted, velvet-lawned, high-hedged, who heard its rural sounds as they were when the tolling of a bell was the loudest sound upon the air, or the bellowing of an unmilked cow, the scream of a rabbit in the jaws of a weasel. He knew nothing of trains, airplanes, motor cars, factory whistles, wireless; his was the England to which Englishmen long sometimes to return.

  True that in the world about him great events were afoot. He lived in the days of Clive and Wolfe, of Pitt and Burke, of Washington and Danton. But neither empire nor parliament, not revolt in America nor regicide in France, disturb his tranquil pages. His science is serene above the clash of arms and opinions, as science should be. But so good a parochial was White that he probably did not care whether the empire expanded or contracted, while Selborne’s evening blackbirds were not interrupted at vespers. He belonged to an England that was perfectly sure of itself.

  His scientific age was also more full of stir than he ever recognizes. Even in his times he was a bit anachronistic. He is slow to adopt the convenience of Linnaean binominal nomenclature, though he admires its latinity. Deliberately he seems to cultivate his amateurism; he stays with no subject long, pursues none to the bottom, is nothing of a “grind,” and yet, though he is enthusiastic or even poetic about nothing, is not quite ever a pedant, for the smell of fresh turned loam is on every page of his book, and he seems to have come in from listening to the first cuckoo’s call only the moment before.

  For this very reason he has raised up admirers by the thousand and hundreds of thousands; he is just as popular today as ever. For he is somehow wondrously accessible to all of us; his is a book to dip in, and dip and dip; it is inexhaustible in its light sweet charm. No art could have achieved this effect, but only complete ingenuousness. The man must have been precisely what the book is; the man, since nothing else much is known of him, is the book, and this has gone through some seventy-five editions.

  The Natural History of Selborne first appeared in London in 1789, but some of the materials had appeared earlier in scientific journals. Such is the case with the selections I have made, which were printed in the Philosophical Transactions in 1774 and 1775, constituting a little monograph on the swallow family in England. More, the materials of the book were in great part a compilation of letters written to his two friends, the eminent ornithologist Thomas Pennant, and the fellow dilettante, Daines Barrington. He began writing to the Welsh ornithologist in 1767, and a little later to Barrington, who like White was an antiquarian, a lover of the Greek and Latin writers, and was, moreover, the author of a tract of observations upon singing birds, and another on the speech of birds. To Barrington, White could write a letter about lightning, another on gypsies, one on the strange predilection of an idiot boy for bees, and still another on the possibility that swallows hibernate under the water, without in any way violating Barrington’s ideas of the business of natural science. Barrington was even more of a dabbler than White.

  The book as White finally arranged it opens with nine fictitious letters; that is to say, they take the form of correspondence but are really introductory passages giving the reader the topography and natural history of the parish at a glance. It closes with more of the same sort. The real letters, living and strong in liter
ary style, occupy the great central portion of the book, and from these I have made my selection.

  I chose the swallows, martins and swift because they are the most famous and justly famous of White’s pages. And for the curious fantastical theorizing of the times which they reveal. And because, as it seems to an American, these are such typically European birds, intimate with man, adapted to nesting about his dwellings, gentle and sweet. True that the swifts are no longer considered to belong to the swallow family which superficially they resemble in form, flight, and habit. But White thought of them so; his age accepted their classification together. So I leave them.

  It was to antiquity, even classic naturalists, that White and Barrington owed the notion of the hibernation of these birds. Nobody now believes that swallows in autumn crowd on a twig over the river till, bending under the weight of the birds, it lowers them beneath the surface—they singing all the time a doleful dirge. Nobody believes that sand martins hole up in cliffs and sleep out the inclement season, or that swifts curl up like bats in belfries, in a state of torpor. But in White’s day, naturalists could not bring themselves to accept the idea that the swallow family migrated, at least not wholly. Peter Kalm, and his countryman Wallerius, assert hibernation as something they actually witnessed. Be it noted that our Gilbert White, though longing for evidence to support hibernation, and searching for it everywhere, never once asserts that he witnessed any fact to prove his theory. He reports hearsay with all due skepticism and brings forth evidence for the migration of swallows frankly and completely. This should rank him with any modern scientist, and confirm our complete trust in what he has to say.

  THE SWALLOW

  To the Honorable Daines Barrington

  Selborne, Jan. 29th, 1774.

  Dear Sir,—The house-swallow, or chimney-swallow, is undoubtedly the first comer of all the British hirundines.

  It is worth remarking that these birds are seen first about lakes and mill-ponds; and it is also very particular, that if these early visitors happen to find frost and snow, they immediately withdraw for a time. A circumstance this much more in favour of hiding than migration; since it is much more probable that a bird should retire to its hybernaculum just at hand, then return for a week or two only to warmer latitudes.

  The swallow, though called the chimney-swallow, by no means builds altogether in chimneys, but often within barns and outhouses against the rafters.

  In Sweden she builds in barns, and is called ladu swala, the barn-swallow. Besides, in the warmer parts of Europe there are no chimneys to houses, except they are English-built: in these countries she constructs her nest in porches, and gateways, and galleries, and open halls.

  Here and there a bird may affect some odd, peculiar place; as we have known a swallow build down the shaft of an old well, but in general with us this hirundo breeds in chimneys; and loves to haunt those stacks where there is a constant fire, no doubt for the sake of warmth. Not that it can subsist in the immediate shaft where there is a fire; but prefers one adjoining to that of the kitchen, and disregards the perpetual smoke of that funnel, as I have often observed with some degree of wonder.

  Five or six or more feet down the chimney does this little bird begin to form her nest about the middle of May, which consists, like that of the house-martin, of a crust or shell composed of dirt or mud, mixed with short pieces of straw to render it tough and permanent; with this difference, that whereas the shell of the martin is nearly hemispheric, that of the swallow is open at the top, and like half a deep dish: this nest is lined with fine grasses, and feathers, which are often collected as they float in the air.

  Wonderful is the address which this adroit bird shows all day long in ascending and descending with security through so narrow a pass. When hovering over the mouth of the funnel, the vibrations of her wings acting on the confined air occasion a rumbling like thunder. It is not improbable that the dam submits to this inconvenient situation so low in the shaft, in order to secure her broods from rapacious birds, and particularly from owls, which frequently fall down chimneys, perhaps in attempting to get at these nestlings.

  The swallow lays from four to six white eggs, dotted with red specks; and brings out her first brood about the last week in June, or the first week in July. The progressive method by which the young are introduced into life is very amusing; first, they emerge from the shaft with difficulty enough, and often fall down into the rooms below: for a day or so they are fed on the chimney-top, and then are conducted to the dead leafless bough of some tree, where, sitting in a row, they are attended with great assiduity, and may then be called perchers. In a day or two more they become flyers, but are still unable to take their own food; therefore they play about near the place where the dams are hawking for flies; and, when a mouthful is collected, at a certain signal given, the dam and the nestling advance, rising towards each other, and meeting at an angle; the young one all the while uttering such a little quick note of gratitude and complacency, that a person must have paid very little regard to the wonders of Nature that has not often remarked this feat.

  All the summer long is the swallow a most instructive pattern of unwearied industry and affection; for, from morning to night, while there is a family to be supported, she spends the whole day in skimming close to the ground, and exerting the most sudden turns and quick evolutions. Avenues, and long walks under hedges, and pasture-fields, and mown meadows where cattle graze, are her delight, especially if there are trees interspersed; because in such spots insects most abound. When a fly is taken a smart snap from her bill is heard, resembling the noise at the shutting of a watch-case; but the motion of the mandibles is too quick for the eye.

  Each species of hirundo drinks as it flies along, sipping the surface of the water; but the swallow alone, in general, washes on the wing, by dropping into a pool for many times together: in very hot weather house-martins and bank-martins dip and wash a little.

  The swallow is a delicate songster, and in soft sunny weather sings both perching and flying; on trees in a kind of concert, and on chimney-tops: is also a bold flyer, ranging to distant downs and commons even in windy weather, which the other species seem much to dislike; nay, even frequenting exposed sea-port towns, and making little excursions over the salt water. Horsemen on wide downs are often closely attended by a little party of swallows for miles together, which plays before and behind them, sweeping around them, and collecting all the skulking insects that are roused by the trampling of the horses’ feet: when the wind blows hard, without this expedient, they are often forced to settle to pick up their lurking prey.

  This species feeds much on little Coleoptera, as well as on gnats and flies; and often settles on dug ground, or paths, for gravels to grind and digest its food. Before they depart, for some weeks, to a bird, they forsake houses and chimneys, and roost in trees; and usually withdraw about the beginning of October, though some few stragglers may appear on at times till the first week in November.

  Some few pairs haunt the new and open streets of London next the fields, but do not enter, like the house-martin, the close and crowded parts of the city.

  Both male and female are distinguished from their congeners by the length and forkedness of their tails. They are undoubtedly the most nimble of all the species: and when the male pursues the female in amorous chase, they then go beyond their usual speed and exert a rapidity almost too quick for the eye to follow.

  I am,

  With all respect, &c. &c.

  THE SAND-MARTIN

  To the Honorable Daines Barrington

  Selborne, Feb. 26th, 1774.

  Dear Sir,—The sand-martin, or bank-martin, is by much the least of any of the British hirundines, and, as far as we have ever seen, the smallest known hirundo, though Brisson asserts that there is one much smaller, and that is the hirundo esculenta.