tV Southern Branch of the University of California Los Angeles Form L-l QL C7G This book is DUE on the last date stamped below 3 ^23 . . - MAY 7 19& NOV 7 1930 MAP MAY <&^r-d c J ^ S-cr^&S A YEAR WITH THE BIRDS C< R /Q f y Fox and Snow-finches. p. 100. A YEAR WITH THE BIRDS JiY W. WARDE FOWLER AUTHOR OV "TALES OK THE BIRDS," ETC. " L'uccello ha maggior copia di vita esteriore e interiore, clie ncn lianno gli altri animali. Ora, se la vita e cosa piii perfetta che il suo contrario, alnieno nel!e creature viventi : e se percio la maggior copia di vita e maggiore perfezione ; anche per questo inodo seguita che la natura degli uccelli sia piii perfetta." L.EOPARUI : Elogio degli uccelli. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRYAN HOOK ?ionbon MACMILLAN AND CO, AND NEW YORK 1891 ;HARD CI.AY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAY. first two editions published elsewhere. Third edition, 1889; Reprinted, 1891 PATRI MEO QVI CVM AVCVPIS NOMINE AVIVM AMOREM FILIO TRADIDIT Jj PREFACE. HPHIS little book is nothing more than an attempt to help those who love birds, but know little about them, to realize something of the enjoyment which I have gained, in work-time as well as in holiday, for many years past, from the habit of watching and listening for my favourites. What I have to tell, such as it is, is told in close ) relation to two or three localities : an English city, an ' English village, and a well-known district of the Alps. H This novelty (if it be one) is not likely, I think, to cause the ordinary reader any difficulty. Oxford is so familiar to numbers of English people apart from its permanent residents, that I have ventured to write of it without stopping to describe its geography ; and I have pur- posely confined myself to the city and its precincts, in order to show how rich in bird-life an English town may be. The Alps, too, arc known to thousands, and the walk I have described in Chapter III., if the reader should be unacquainted with it, may easily be followed by reference to the excellent maps of the Oberland in the guide-books of Ball or Baedeker. The chapters viii Preface. about the midland village, which lies in ordinary English country, will explain their own geography. One word about the title and the arrangement of the chapters. We Oxford tutors always reckon our year as beginning with the October term, and ending with the close of the Long Vacation. My chapters are arranged on this reckoning ; to an Oxford residence from October to June, broken only by short vacations, succeeds a brief holiday in the Alps ; then comes a sojourn in the mid- lands ; and of the leisurely studies which the latter part of the Long Vacation allows, I have given an ornithological specimen in the last chapter. Some parts of the first, second, and fifth chapters have appeared in the Oxford Magazine, and I have to thank the Editors for leave to reprint them. The third chapter, or rather the substance of it, was given as a lecture to the energetic Natural History Society of Marlborough College, and has already been printed in their reports ; the sixth chapter has been developed out of a paper lately read before the Oxford Philological Society. The reader will notice that I have said very little about uncommon birds, and have tried to keep to the habits, songs, and haunts of the commoner kinds, which their very abundance endears to their human friends. I have made no collection, and it will therefore be obvious to ornithologists that I have no scientific knowledge of structure and classification beyond that which I have obtained at second-hand. And, indeed, if I thought I Preface. ix were obtruding myself on the attention of ornithologists, I should feel as audacious as the Robin which is at this moment, in my neighbour's outhouse, sitting on eggs for which, with characteristic self-confidence, she has chosen a singular resting-place in an old cage, once the prison- house of an ill-starred Goldfinch. There are few days, from March to July, when even the shortest stroll may not reveal something of interest to the careful watcher. It was pleasant, this brilliant spring morning, to find that a Redstart, perhaps the same individual noticed on page 120, had not forgotten my garden during his winter sojourn in the south ; and that a pair of Pied Flycatchers, the first of their species which I have known to visit us here, were trying to make up their minds to build their nest in an old gray wall, almost within a stone's throw of our village church. KlNGHAM, OXON. April 24, 1886. NOTE TO SECOND EDITION. MY little book, which never expected to spread the circle of its acquaintance much beyond its Oxford friends, has been introduced by the goodwill of reviewers to a wider society, and has been apparently welcomed there. To enable it to present itself in the world to better advantage, I have added to it a new chapter on the Alpine birds, and have made a considerable number of additions and corrections in the original chapters ; but I hope I have left it as modest and unpretending as I originally meant it to be. During the process of revision, I have been aided by valuable criticisms and suggestions from several ornitho- logical and bird-loving friends, and particularly from Rev. H. A. Macpherson, A. H. Macpherson, Esq., O. V. Aplin, Esq., and W. T. Arnold, Esq., whose initials will be found here and there in notes and appendices. I have also to thank Archdeacon Palmer for most kindly pointing out some blemishes in the chapter on the Birds of Virgil. W. WARDE FOWLER. LINCOLN COLLEGE, OXFORD. Nov. 19, 1886. NOTE TO THIRD EDITION. THOUGH my knowledge of birds has naturally grown fast since I wrote these chapters, I have thought it better, except in one instance, to resist the temptation of re-writing or interpolating for this edition. The book stands almost exactly as it was when the second edition was issued ; but the list of Oxford birds is omitted, as Mr. Aplin's work on the Birds of Oxfordshire, shortly to be published by the Clarendon Press, will embody all the information there given. I regret that the frontispiece, drawn for the original edition by my friend Professor W. Baldwin Spencer, can no longer be reproduced. I wish to express my thanks to Mr. B. H. Blackwell, of Oxford, not only for the care and pains he bestowed upon the issue of the former editions, but for the ready courtesy with which he fell in with my wish to transfer the book to the hands of Messrs. Macmillan. W. W. F. June 4, 1889. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. OXFORD : AUTUMN AND WINTER. PAGE How I came to notice birds Oxford favourable to bird-life Late lingerers in October Migration and pugnacity of Robins The Bullfinch and the buds Parsons' Pleasure and the Cherwell Kingfishers rare in the summer term Colouring of the Kingfisher The Gray Wagtail at the weir ; its beauty The Lesser Redpoll An eccentric Jack-snipe Birds of the Park and Magdalen Walk Lesser Spotted Woodpecker Christchurch meadow and the Botanic Gar- den ; Titmice, Blackbirds, Redwings Sea-birds in Port Meadow . 1 CHAPTER II. OXFORD : SPRING AND SUMMER. Departure of winter birds Warblers ; explanation of the term Different kinds of warblers Tree-warblers Chiff-chaff's arrival Willow- warbler's song and nest Blackcap and Garden-warbler ; their songs compared The two White- throats at Parsons' Pleasure ; how to distinguish them River-warblers ; comparative rarity of Reed-warbler ; his song compared with Sedge-warbler's The Redstart and pollard willows Summer habits of Oxford Sparrows Fly- catcher and other birds in the Parks 35 Contents. CHAPTER III. THE ALPS IN JUNE. PAGE The Alpine pastures in June Ornithologists and the Alps Johann Anderegg, a peasant naturalist Number of species in Switzerland ; abundance of food Migration, complete and partial The Alps how far a barrier to migrating birds The three ornithological regions of Switzerland ; migrations within them Stanz-stadt and its reed-bed Valley of the Aa White Wagtail and Black Redstart The Swallow family The Alps proper and their birds ; Water-pipit, etc. Citril Finch at the Engstlen Alp Snow-finches Rock-creeper ; its habits Birds of the pine-forests ; Woodpeckers, Tit- miceCrested Tit in the Gentelthal Bonelli's Warbler at Meiringen 68 CHAPTER IV. A MIDLAND VILLAGE. GARDEN AND MEADOW. Description of the vale of the Evenlode Situation of the village ; variety of scenery Movements of the birds in the district A bird-haunted garden Redstart ; its increase of late years A Black Redstart on an ugly wall Cuckoo and Robin's nest rlngenious Nuthatches Spotted Flycatcher ; his peculiarities Allotments and Rooks Green Sandpiper in the brook ; occurrence in midwinter Habits of young birds Rooks hostile to intruders Long-tailed Tits on the ice . in CHAPTER V. A MIDLAND VILLAGE : RAILWAY AND WOODLAND. Railways favourable to birds Whinchat and Stonechat Peculiarities of the Buntings Nests by the railway Ring- Contents. xv PAGE ousel Song of the Tree-pipit Pipits, Larks, Wagtails Predatory birds of the woods Interview with a Grasshopper Warbler ; its " reel " Beauty of the Nightingale ; its habits and song Song-birds of the woods Woodpeckers Birds of the hills Local migrations during the year 144 CHAPTER VI. THE ALPS IN SEPTEMBER. Geography of Switzerland Bird-catching on the passes Birds on the Brtinig Pass The Hasli-Thal Crossbills The Gadmen-Thal and Stein-alp Migration on the Susten-pass Hospenthal Departure of Swallows Migration of insects Return to Meiringen The Swiss peasant 177 CHAPTER VII. THE BIRDS OF VIRGIL. Virgil's haunts in Italy, in boyhood and manhood Virgil true to nature Pigeons in his poems Crane and Stork ; their migrations Corvus and comix Swans The ' alcyon,' in Latin and Greek ornithology Voice of the Kingfisher The ' acalanthis ' ; warblers in Italy and Greece Virgil's sea-birds and swallows Nightingale in Homer and Virgil Simile of ghosts and birds in Sixth Aeneid Autumn migra- tions from the north 210 NOTES 255 INDEX 263 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE Fox and Snow Finches Frontispiece First Lesson in Flying 20 Redpoles 22 Early Ablutions 28 The Tern, or Sea Swallow 34 Fieldfares 35 Reed Warbler to face 42 Nest on College Bell 67 The Alps in June Headpiece 68 Bonelli's Warbler no Kingham Rectory in Feat of a Nuthatch 129 Nest of Spotted Flycatcher 131 Rooks worrying Gulls 142 Whinchat on Telegraph Wires 144 Grasshopper Warbler 155 Outdoor Relief 175 The Alps in September Headpiece 177 Crossbills to face 1 89 Johann Anderegg 209 Willow Warbler's Nest 254 A YEAR WITH THE BIRDS. CHAPTER I. OXFORD: AUTUMN AND WINTER. FOR several years past I have contrived, even on the busiest or the rainiest Oxford mornings, to steal out for twenty minutes or half an hour soon after breakfast, and in the Broad Walk the Botanic Garden, or the Parks, to let my senses exerc.se themselves on things outside me. This habit dates from the time when I was an ardent fisherman, and daily within reach of trout ; a long spell of work in the early morning use d to be effectually counteracted by an endeavour to beguile a trout after breakfast. By^degrees, and owing to altered circumstances, Oxford: Autumn and Winter. the rod has given way to a field-glass, and the passion for killing has been displaced by a desire to see and know ; a revolution which I consider has been beneficial, not only to the trout, but to myself. In the peaceful study of birds I have found an occupation which exactly falls in with the habit I had formed for it is in the early morning that birds are most active and least dis- turbed by human beings ; an occupation too which can be carried on at all times of the day in Oxford with much greater success than I could possibly have imagined when I began it. Even for one who has not often time or strength to take long rambles in the country round us, it is astonishing how much of the beauty, the habits, and the songs of birds may be learnt within the city itself, or in its immediate precincts. The fact is, that for several obvious reasons, Oxford is almost a Paradise of birds. All the conditions of the neighbourhood, as it is now, are favourable to them. The three chief requisites of the life of most birds are food, water, and some kind of cover. For food, be they insect-eaters, or grub-eaters, they need never lack near Oxford. A Paradise of Birds. Our vast expanse of moist alluvial meadow unequalled at any other point in the Thames valley is extraordinarily productive of grubs and flies, as it is of other things unpleasant to man. Any one can verify this for himself who will walk along the Isis on a warm summer evening, or watch the Sand-martins as he crosses the meadows to Hincksey. Snails too abound; no less than ninety-three species have been collected and re- corded by a late pupil of mine. The ditches in all the water-meadows are teeming with fresh-water mollusks, and I have seen them dying by hundreds when left high and dry in a sultry season. Water of course is everywhere ; the fact that our city was built at the confluence of Isis and Cherwell has had a good deal of influence on its bird-life. But after all, as far as the city itself is concerned, it is probably the conservative tranquillity and the comfortable cover of the gardens and parks that has chiefly attracted the birds. I fancy there is hardly a town in Europe of equal size where such favourable conditions are offered them, unless it be one of the old-fashioned well-timbered kind, such as Wiesbaden, Bath, or Dresden. The B 2 4 Oxford: Autumn and Winter. college system, which has had so much influence on Oxford in other ways, and the control exercised by the University over the government of the town, have had much to do with this, and the only adverse element even at the present day is the gradual but steady extension of building to the north, south, and west. A glance at a map of Oxford will show how large a space in the centre of the town is occupied by college gardens, all well-timbered and planted, and if to these are added Christchurch Meadow, Magdalen Park, the Botanic Garden, and the Parks, together with the adjoining fields, it will be seen that there must be abundant opportunity for observations, and some real reason for an attempt to record them. Since the appearance in the Oxford Magazine, in May, 1884, of a list of "The Birds of Oxford City," I have been so repeatedly questioned about birds that have been seen or heard, that it is evident there are plenty of possessors of eyes and ears, ready and able to make use of them. There are many families of children growing up in " the Parks " who may be glad to learn that life in a town such as Oxford is, does not exclude A Paradise of Birds. them from some of the pleasures of the country. And I hold it to be an unquestioned fact, that the direction of children's attention to natural objects is one of the most valuable processes in education. When these children, or at least the boys among them, go away to their respective public schools, they will find themselves in the grip of a system of compulsory game-playing which will effectually prevent any attempt at patient observation. There is doubtless very much to be said for this system, if it be applied, like a strong remedy, with real discriminating care ; but the fact is beyond question, that it is doing a great deal to undermine and destroy some of the Englishman's most valuable habits and characteristics, and among others, his acute- ness of observation, in which, in his natural state, he excels all other nationalities. It is all the more necessary that we should teach our children, before they leave home, some of the simplest and most obvious lessons of natural history. So in the following pages it will be partly my object to write of the Oxford birds in such a way that any one of any age may be able to recognize Oxford: Autumn and Winter. some of the most interesting species that meet the eye or ear of a stroller within the precincts of the city. And with this object before me, it will be convenient, I think, to separate winter and summer, counting as winter the whole period from October to March, and as summer the warm season from our return to Oxford in April up to the heart of the Long Vacation ; and we will begin with the beginning of the University year, by which plan we shall gain the advantage of having to deal with a few birds only to start with, and those obvious to the eye among leafless branches, thus clearing the way for more difficult observation of the summer migrants, which have to be detected among all the luxuriousness of our Oxford foliage. I shall call the birds by their familiar English names, wherever it is possible to do so without danger of confounding species ; but for accuracy's sake, a list of all birds noticed in these pages, with their scientific names according to the best, or at any rate the latest, terminology, will be given in an appendix. When we return to Oxford after our Long Late Lingerers. Vacation, the only summer migrants that have not departed southwards are a few Swallows, to be seen along the banks of the river, and half-a- dozen lazy Martins that may cling for two or three weeks longer to their favourite nooks about the buildings of Merton and Magdalen. Last year (1884) none of these stayed to see No- vember, so far as I could ascertain ; but they were arrested on the south coast by a spell of real warm weather, where the genial sun was deluding the Robins and Sparrows into fancying the winter already past. In some years they may be seen on sunny days, even up to the end of the first week of November, hawking for flies about the meadow-front of Merton, probably the warmest spot in Oxford. White of Selborne saw one as late as the 2Oth of November, on a very sunny warm morning, in one of the quadrangles of Christchurch ; it belonged, no doubt, to a late September brood, and had been unable to fly when the rest departed. It is at first rather sad to find silence reigning in the thickets and reed -beds that were alive with songsters during the summer term. The Oxford: Autumn and Winter. familiar pollards and thorn - bushes, where the Willow -warblers and Whitethroats were every morning to be seen or heard, are like so many desolate College rooms in the heart of the Long Vacation. Deserted nests, black and mouldy, come to light as the leaves drop from the trees nurseries whose children have gone forth to try their fortune in distant countries. But we soon discover that things are not so bad as they seem. The silence is not quite unbroken : winter visitors arrive, and the novelty of their voices is cheering, even if they do not break into song ; some kinds are here in greater numbers than in the hot weather, and others show themselves more boldly, emerging from leafy recesses in search of food and sunshine. Every autumn brings us a considerable immi- gration of birds that have been absent during the summer, and increases the number of some species who reside with us in greater or less abundance all the year. Among these is the familiar Robin. My friend the Rev. H. A. Mac- pherson, in his recently published Birds of Cum- berland, tells us that in that northern county the Robins. Robins slip quietly away southward in autumn. And it is in September and October that every town and village in the south of England is en- livened by their numbers and the pathetic beauty of their song ; a song which I have observed as being of finer quality in England than on the continent, very possibly owing to a greater abun- dance of rich food. I have been even tempted to fancy that our English Robin is a finer and stouter bird than his continental relations. Cer- tainly he is more numerous here at all times of the year, and he may travel where he pleases without fear of persecution ; while the French and German Robins, who for the most part make for Italy in the autumn, return in spring in greatly diminished numbers, owing to the in- curable passion of the Italians for " robins on toast." It does not seem that they come to us in great numbers from foreign shores, as do many others of our common birds at this time of the year ; but they move northwards and southwards within our island, presumably seeking always a moderately warm climate. At Parsons' Pleasure I have seen io Oxford: Autumn and Winter. the bushes literally alive with them in October and November, in a state of extreme liveliness and pugnacity. This is the great season of their battles. Most country-people know of the war- fare between the old and young Robins, and will generally tell you that the young ones kill their parents. The truth seems to be that after their autumnal moult, in the confidence of renewed strength, the old ones attack their offspring, and succeed in forcing them to seek new homes. This combativeness is of course accompanied by- fresh vigour of song. Birds will sing, as I am pretty well convinced, under any kind of pleasant or exciting emotion such as love, abundance of food, warmth, or anger ; and the outbreak of the Robin's song in autumn is to be ascribed, in part at least, to the last of these. Other reasons may be found, such as restored health after the moult, or the arrival in a warmer climate after immi- gration, or possibly even the delusion, already noticed, which not uncommonly possesses them in a warm autumn, that it is their duty to set about pairing and nest-building already. But all these would affect other species also, and the Robins and Bullfinches t 1 1 only reason which seems to suit the idiosyncrasies of the Robin is this curious rivalry between young and old. The Robins, I need not say, are everywhere ; but there are certain kinds of birds for which we must look out in particular places. I mentioned Parsons' Pleasure just now ; and we may take it very well as a starting-point, offering as it does, in a space of less than a hundred yards square, every kind of supply that a bird can possibly want ; water, sedge, reeds, meadows, gravel, rail- ings, hedges, and trees and bushes of many kinds forming abundant cover. In this cover, as you walk along the footpath towards the weir, you will very likely see a pair of Bullfinches. They were here the greater part of last winter, and are occasionally seen even in college and private gardens ; but very rarely in the breeding-season or the summer, when they are away in the densest woods, where their beautiful nest and eggs are not too often found. Should they be at their usual work of devouring buds, it is well worth while to stop and watch the process ; at Parsons' Pleasure they can do no serious harm, and the 12 Oxford: Autumn and Winter. Bullfinch's bill is not an instrument to be lightly passed over. It places him apart from all other common English birds, and brings him into the same sub-family as the Crossbill and the Pine- Grosbeak. It is short, wide, round, and parrot-like in having the upper mandible curved downwards over the lower one, and altogether admirably suited for snipping off and retaining those fat young juicy buds, from which, as some believe, the Bullfinch has come by his name. 1 Parsons' Pleasure, i. e. the well-concealed bath- ing-place which goes by this name, stands at the narrow apex of a large island which is formed by the river Cherwell, itself here running in two channels which enclose the walk known as Mesopotamia, and the slow and often shallow stream by which Holy well mill is worked. The bird-lover will never cross the rustic bridge which brings him into the island over this latter stream, without casting a rapid glance to right and left. Here in the summer we used to listen to the 1 The name is sometimes said to be a corruption of bud- finch. But Prof. Skeat (Etym. Diet., s. v. Bull} compares it with bull-dog, the prefix in each case suggesting the stout build of the animal. Kingfishers. 1 3 Nightingale, or watch the Redstarts and Fly- catchers in the willows, or feast our eyes with the splendid deep and glossy black-blue of the Swallow's back, as he darted up and down beneath the bridge in doubtful weather. And here of a winter morning you may see a pair of Moorfowl paddling out of the large patch of rushes that lies opposite the bathing-place on the side of the Parks ; here they breed in the summer, with only the little Reed-warblers as companions. And here there is always in winter at least a chance of seeing a Kingfisher. Why these beau- tiful birds are comparatively seldom to be seen in or about Oxford from March to July is a question not very easy to answer. The keeper of the bathing-place tells me that they go up to breed in ditches which run down to the Cherwell from the direction of Marston and Elsneld ; and this is perhaps borne out by the discovery of a nest by a friend of mine, then incumbent of Wood- eaton, in a deserted quarry between that village and Elsfield, fully a mile from the river. One would suppose, however, that the birds would be about the river, if only to supply their voracious 14 Oxford: Antnmn and Winter. young with food, unless we are to conclude that they feed them principally with slugs and such small-fry. Here is a point which needs investi- gation. The movements of the Kingfisher seem to be only partly understood, but that they do migrate, whether for short or long distances, I have no doubt whatever. 1 On the Evenlode, another Oxfordshire river, which runs from Moreton-in- the-Marsh to join the Isis at Eynsham, they are rarely to be seen between March and September, or August at the earliest, while I seldom take a walk along the stream in the winter months without seeing one or more of them. This bird is one of those which owe much to the Wild Birds Act, of which a short account will be found in Note A, at the end of this volume. It may not be shot between March and August, and though it may be slaughtered in the winter with impunity, the gun-licence and its own rapid flight give it a fair chance of escape. Formerly it was a frequent victim : By green Rother's reedy side The blue Kingfisher flashed and died. 1 See Mr. Seebohm's British Birds, vol. ii. p. 345. Kingfishers. 1 5 Blue is the prevailing tint of the bird as he flies from you : it is seldom that you see him coming towards you ; but should that happen, the tint that you chiefly notice is the rich chestnut of the throat and breast. One Sunday morning, as I was standing on the Cherwell bank just below the Botanic Garden, a Kingfisher, failing to see me, flew almost into my arms, shewing this chestnut hue ; then suddenly wheeled, and flashed away all blue and green, towards Magdalen Bridge. I have seen a Kingfisher hovering like a dragon-fly or humming-bird over a little sapling almost un- derneath the bridge by which you enter Addison's Walk. Possibly it was about to strike a fish, but unluckily it saw me and vanished, piping shrilly. The sight was one of marvellous beauty, though it lasted but a few seconds. One story is told about the Kingfisher, which I commend to those who study the varying effects of colours on the eye. Thompson, the famous Irish naturalist, was out shooting when snow was lying on the ground, and repeatedly saw a small brown bird in flight, which entirely puzzled him ; at last he shot it, and found it to be a Kingfisher 1 6 Oxford: Autumn and Winter. in its full natural plumage. 1 Can it be that the swift flash of varying liquid colour, as the bird darts from its perch into the water, is specially calculated to escape the eye of the unsuspecting minnow? It nearly always frequents streams of clear water and rather gentle flow, where its in- tense brightness would surely discover it, even as it sits upon a stone or bough, if its hues as seen through a liquid medium did not lose their sheen. But I must leave these questions to the philo- sophers, and return to Parsons' Pleasure. The island which I have mentioned is joined to Mesopotamia by another bridge just below the weir ; and here is a second post of observation, with one feature that is absent at the upper bridge. There all is silent, unless a breeze is stirring the trees ; here the water prattles gently as it slides down the green slope of the weir into the deep pool below. This motion of the water makes the weir and this part of the Cherwell a favourite spot of a very beautiful little bird, which 1 Mr. O. V. Aplin, of Banbury, tells me that he has heard it stated that if you shoot a Kingfisher, and it falls on the snow, you cannot see it. The Gray Wagtail. 17 haunts it throughout the October term. 1 All the spring and early summer the Gray Wagtail was among the noisy becks and burns of the north, bringing up his young under some spray-splashed stone, or the moist arch of a bridge ; in July he comes southwards, and from that time till Decem- ber or January is constantly to be seen along Cherwell and Isis. He is content with sluggish water if he can find none that is rapid ; but the sound of the falling water is as surely grateful to his ear as the tiny crustaceans he finds in it are to his palate. For some time last autumn (1884) I saw him nearly every day, either on the stone- work of the weir, or walking into its gentle water- slope, or running lightly over the islands of dead leaves in other parts of the Cherwell ; sometimes one pair would be playing among the barges on the Isis, and another at Clasper's boat-house seemed quite unconcerned at the crowd of men and boats. It is always a pleasure to watch them ; and though all Wagtails have their charm 1 In 1885 Gray Wagtails were much less common in the south than in 1884; at the present time (Oct. 1886) they are again in their favourite places (see Frontispiece). C 1 8 Oxford: Autumn and Winter. for me, I give this one the first place, for its matchless delicacy of form, and the gentle grace of all its actions. The Gray Wagtail is misnamed, both in English and Latin ; as we might infer from the fact that in the one case it is named from the colour of its back, and in the other from that of its belly. 1 It should be surely called the Long-tailed Wagtail, for its tail is nearly an inch longer than that of any other species ; or the Brook- Wagtail, because it so rarely leaves the bed of the stream it haunts. All other Wagtails may be seen in meadows, ploughed fields, and uplands ; but though I have repeatedly seen this one within the last year in England, Wales, Ireland, and Switzerland, I never but once saw it away from the water, and then it was for the moment upon a high road in Dorset- shire, and within a few yards of a brook and pool. Those who wish to identify it must remember its long tail and its love of water, and must also look out for the beautiful sulphur yellow of its under parts ; in the spring both male and female have 1 The scientific name is Motacilla sulphurea (in Dresser's List. M. raelanope). The Pied Wagtail. 19 a black chin and throat, like our common Pied Wagtail. No picture, and no stuffed specimen, can give the least idea of what the bird is like : the specimens in our Oxford Museum look " very sadly," as the villagers say ; you must see the living bird in perpetual motion, the little feet running swiftly, the long tail ever gently flicker- ing up and down. How can you successfully draw or stuff a bird whose mo'st remarkable feature is never for a moment still ? While I am upon Wagtails, let me say a word for our old friend the common Pied Wagtail, who is with us in varying numbers all the year round. It is for several reasons a most interesting bird. We have known it from our childhood ; but foreign bird-lovers coming to England would find it new to them, unless they chanced to come from Western France or Spain. Like one or two other species of which our island is the favourite home, it is much darker than its continental cousin the White Wagtail, when in full adult plumage. Young birds are indeed often quite a light gray, and in Magdalen cloisters and garden, where the young broods love to run and seek food on the C 2 The mother flew repeatedly to the young one, hovered before it, chattered and encouraged it in every possible way. p. 21. Lesser Redpolls. 21 beautifully - kept turf, almost every variety of youthful plumage may be seen in June or July, from the sombrest black to the brightest pearl- gray. Last summer, I one day spent a long time here watching the efforts of a parent to induce a young bird to leave its perch and join the others on the turf : the nest must have been placed somewhat high up among the creepers, and the young bird, on leaving it, had ventured no further than a little stone statue above my head. The mother flew repeatedly to the young one, hovered before it, chattered and encouraged it in every possible way ; but it was a long time before she prevailed. Let us now return towards the city, looking into the Parks on our way. The Curators of the Parks, not less generous to the birds than to man- kind, have provided vast stores of food for the former, in the numbers of birches and conifers which flourish under their care. They, or their predecessors who stocked the plantations, seem to have had the particular object of attracting those delightful little north-country birds the Lesser Redpolls, for they have planted every kind of tree 22 Oxford : Autumn and Winter. in whose seeds they find a winter subsistence. hether they come every winter I am un- able to say, and am inclined to doubt it ; but in 1884, any one who went the round of the Parks, keeping an eye on the birches, could hardly fail to see them, and they have been reported not only as taking refuge here in the winter, but even These tiny linneis at work in the delicate birch-boughs. p. 23. Lesser Redpolls. 23 as nesting in the summer. A nest was taken from the branch of a fir-tree here in 1883, and in this present year, if I am not mistaken, another nest was built. I failed to find it, but I several times saw a pair of sportive Redpolls at the south- east corner of the Parks. 1 It is one of the prettiest sights that our whole calendar of bird-life affords, to watch these tiny linnets at work in the delicate birch-boughs. They fear no human being, and can be approached within a very few yards. They almost outdo the Titmice in the amazing variety of their postures. They prefer in a general way to be upside down, and decidedly object to the common-place atti- tudes of more solidly built birds. Otherwise they are not remarkable for beauty at this time of year ; their splendid crimson crest the " Blut- tropf," as the Germans aptly call it is hardly discernible, and the warm pink of their breasts has altogether vanished. 1 At this same south-east corner, in May 1889, 1 have several times found the trees above me alive with these bold little birds. I have also seen an egg taken from a nest in the Botanic Garden. We may now, I think, reckon these as residents both in summer and winter. 24 Oxford: Autumn and Winter. Before we leave the Parks I must record the fact that -an eccentric Jack-snipe, who ought to have considered that he is properly a winter bird in these parts, was several times flushed here by the Cherwell in the summer of 1884, and the natural inference would be that a pair had bred somewhere near. Col. Montagu, the most ac- curate of naturalists, asserted that it has never been known to remain and breed in England ; yet the observer in this case, a well-known college tutor who knows a Jack-snipe when he sees it, has assured me positively that there was no mis- take ; and some well-authenticated cases seem to have occurred since Montagu wrote. 1 There are plenty of common birds to be seen even in winter on most days in the Parks, such as the Skylark, the Yellow-hammer and its relative the Black-headed Bunting, the Pied Wagtail, the Hedge-sparrow, and others ; though lawn-tennis, and cricket, and new houses and brick walls, are slowly and surely driving them beyond the 1 A Jack-snipe picked up under the telegraph wires at Ban- bury in July, 1885, was (Mr. Aplin tells me) in an emaciated condition ; possibly an injured bird unable to migrate. Nuthatch and Creeper. 25 Cherwell for food and shelter. But there are some birds which may be seen to greater advantage in another part of Oxford, and we will take the short line to Christchurch Meadow, past Holy- well Church, doubtless the abode of Owls, and the fine elms of Magdalen Park, beloved by the Woodpigeons. All this lower part of the Cherwell, from Holy- well mill to its mouth at the barges, abounds in snug and secure retreats for the birds. In Addi- son's Walk, as well as in the trees in Christ- church Meadow, dwell the Nuthatch and the Tree-creeper, both remarkable birds in all their ways, and each representative of a family of which no other member has ever been found in these islands. They are tree-climbing birds, but they climb in very different ways : the Creeper helping himself, like the Woodpeckers, with the down- ward-bent feathers of his strong tail ; while the Nuthatch, having no tail to speak of, relies chiefly on his hind claw. These birds are now placed, on account of the structure of their feet, in a totally different order to that of the Woodpeckers, who rank with the Swifts and the Nightjars. 26 Oxford: Autumn and Winter. One is apt to think of the Creeper as a silent and very busy bird, who never finds leisure to rest and preen his feathers, or to relieve his mind with song. When he does sing he takes us a little aback. One spring morning, as I was strolling in the Broad Walk, a Creeper flew past me and fixed himself on the thick branch of an elm not on a trunk, as usual and uttered a loud and vigorous song, something after the manner of the Wren's. I had to turn the glass upon him to make sure that there was no mistake. This is the only occasion on which I have ever heard the Creeper sing, and it seems strange that a bird with so strong a voice should use it so seldom. I have never but once seen the Green Wood- pecker in Oxford, and that was as he flew rapidly- over the Parks in the direction of the Magdalen elms. If he lives there, he must be known to the Magdalen men, but I have not had intelligence of him. The fact is that he is a much wilder bird than his near relation, the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, who is, or was, beyond doubt an Oxford resident. A correspondent of the Oxford The Woodpecker. 27 Magazine, " R. W. R.," states that this bird bred outside his window at Trinity a few years ago, "but has not done so lately for reasons of his own, of which I approve." Another correspondent, how- ever, reports him from Addison's Walk ; and Mr. Macpherson of Oriel, whose eye is not likely to have erred, believed that he saw one in the Broad Walk a few years ago. I myself have not seen the bird nearer Oxford than Kennington ; but I am pretty sure that it is commoner and also less shy than is generally imagined, and also that the ornithologist who sees it is not likely to mistake it for another bird : its very small size it is not so large as a sparrow its crimson head, and its wings, with their black and white bars, making it a conspicuous object to a practised eye. 1 Christchurch Meadow is a favourite home of the Titmice. I believe that I have seen all the five English species here within a space of a very few days : English, not British, for there is one other, the Crested Tit, of which I shall have more to say in another chapter. A family of Longtails, 1 In May, 1886, I saw one in a pollard willow at the northern edge of the Parks, near the new boathouse. A blackbird proceeded calmly to take his bath in the fountain. p. 30. The Titmouse. 29 or Bottle-tits, flits from bush to bush, never asso- ciating with the others, and so justifying its scientific separation from them. Another family is to be seen in the Parks, where they build a nest every year. These delightful little birds are however quite willing to live in the very centre of a town, indifferent to noise and dust. A Marsh-tit was once seen performing its antics on a lamp-post in St. Giles. A Great-tit built its nest in the stump of an old laburnum, in the little garden of Lincoln College, within a few yards of the Turl and High Street ; the nest was dis- covered by my dog, who was prowling about the garden with a view to cats. I took great interest in this brood, which was successfully reared, and on one occasion I watched the parents bringing food to their young for twenty minutes, during which time they were fed fourteen times. The ringing note of this Great-tit or his relations is the first to be heard in that garden in winter-time, and is always welcome. The little Blue-tit is also forthcoming there at times. One Sunday morning I saw a Blue-tit climbing the walls of my College quadrangle, almost after the manner 30 Oxford: Autumn and Winter. of a Creeper, searching the crannies for insects, and even breaking down the crust of weathered stone. Among memories of the rain, mist, and hard work of many an Oxford winter spent among these gray walls, " haec olim meminisse juvabit." But I have strayed away from Christchurch Meadow and the Botanic Garden. Here it is more especially that the Thrush tribe makes its presence felt throughout the autumn. In the Gardens the thrushes and blackbirds have become so tame from constant quiet and protection, that, like the donkeys at Athens of which Plato tells us, they will hardly deign to move out of your way. A blackbird proceeded calmly to take his bath, in the fountain at the lower end near the meadow, one morning when I was looking on, and seemed to be fully aware of the fact that there was a locked gate between us. Missel- thrushes are also to be seen here ; and all these birds go out of a morning to breakfast on a thickly-berried thorn-bush at the Cherwell end of the Broad Walk, where they meet with their relations the Redwings, and now and then with Blackbirds and Berries. 31 a Fieldfare. The walker round the meadow in winter will seldom fail to hear the harsh call of the redwing, as, together with starlings innumer- able, and abundance of blackbirds, they utter loud sounds of disapproval. There is one bush here whose berries must have some strange ambrosial flavour that blackbirds dearly love. All the blackbirds in Oxford seem to have their free breakfast-table here, and they have grown so bold that they will return to it again and again as I teasingly walk up and down in front of it, merely Hying to a neighbouring tree when I scrutinize them too closely in search of a lingering Ring- ousel. Who ever heard of a flock of blackbirds ? Here, however, in November, 1884, was a sight to be seen, which might possibly throw some light on the process of developing gregarious habits. 1 Rooks, Starlings, Jackdaws, and Sparrows, which abound here and everywhere else in 1 At Lulworth, in Dorset, when the berry-season begins, I have noticed that the blackbirds will congregate on the hedge- rows in considerable numbers, and abandon for a time their skulking habits. This makes it often difficult to distinguish them at a distance from the Ring-ousels, which are there about the same time. 32, Oxford: Autumn and Winter. Oxford, every one can observe for themselves, and of Sparrows I shall have something to say in the next chapter ; but let me remind my young readers that every bird is worth noticing, whether it be the rarest or the commonest. My sister laughs at me, because the other day she found an old copy of White's Selborne belonging to me, wherein was inscribed on the page devoted to the Rook, in puerile handwriting, the following annotation : " Common about Bath " (where I was then at school). But I tell her that it was a strictly accurate scientific observation ; and I only wish that I had followed it up with others equally unimpeachable. But more out-of-the-way birds will sometimes come to Oxford, and I have seen a Kestrel trying to hover in a high wind over Christchurch Meadow, and a Heron sitting on the old gate- post in the middle of the field. Herons are often to be seen by the river-bank in Port Meadow ; and it was here, some years ago, that Mr. W. T. Arnold, of University College, was witness of an extraordinary attack made by a party of three on some small birds. Port Meadow constantly en- Visitors from the Sea-coast. 3 3 tices sea-birds when it is under water, or when the water is receding and leaving that horrible slime which -is so unpleasant to the nose of man ; and in fact there is hardly a wader or a scratcher (to use Mr. Ruskin's term) J that has not at one time or another been taken near Ox- ford. Sometimes they come on migration, some- times they are driven by stress of weather. Two Stormy Petrels were caught at Bossom's barge in the Port Meadow not long ago, and exhibited in Mr. Darbey the birdstuffer's window. And a well-known Oxford physician has kindly given me an interesting account of his discovery of a Great Northern Diver, swimming disconsolately in a large hole in the ice near King's Weir, one clay during the famous Crimean winter of 1854-5 5 this splendid bird he shot with a gun borrowed from the inn at Godstow. During the spring and early summer of 1866, our visitors from the sea- coast were constant and numerous. Even the beautiful and graceful little Tern (Sterna Minuta] 1 /. e$ of his constitu- tion is more largely developed. If I walk alongside of the railway, as it passes between the water-meadows and the corn-fields which lie above them, divided on each side from these by a low-lying withy-bed, I always keep an eye upon the telegraph-wires ahead, knowing by long experience that they will tell me what birds are breeding or. have bred about here. As autumn approaches, great numbers indeed of visitors, Swallows, Martins, Linnets, and others, will come and sun themselves here, and even tempt a Sparrow-hawk or Kestrel to beat up and down the line ; but in early summer, beside the Whin -chats, and the Whitethroats nesting in great numbers in the thick quickset hedges which 1 The chat of the Whin-chat is a dissyllable, ' u-tic ' ; that of the Stone-chat a monosyllable, 'chat.' (O. V. A.) L 2 '148 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. border the line, it is chiefly the melancholy tribe of Buntings that will attract my notice. I trust my friends the Buntings will not take offence at being called melancholy ; I cannot retract the word, except in what is now called "a parliamentary sense." I have just been look- ing through a series of plates and descriptions of all the Buntings of Europe, and in almost every one of them I see the same deflected tail and listless attitude, 1 and read of the same monotonous and continually repeated note. The Buntings form in fact, though apt to be confused with one another owing to their very strong family like- ness, perhaps the most clearly-marked and idio- syncratic genus among the whole range of our smaller birds. This may be very easily illustrated from our three common English species. Look at the common Corn Bunting, as he sits on the wires or the hedge -top ; he is lumpy, loose- feathered, spiritless, and flies off with his legs hanging down, and without a trace of agility or 1 The Meadow Bunting (Emberiza da} seemed to me, when I met with it in Switzerland this summer, to be more lively and restless than other Buntings. The Buntings. 149 vivacity ; he is a dull bird, and seems to know it. Even his voice is half-hearted ; it reminds me often of an old man in our village who used to tell us that he had "a wheezing in his pipes." Near him sits a Yellow Bunting (Yellowhammer), a beautiful bird when in full adult plumage of yellow head, orange-brown back, white outer tail- feathers, and pink legs ; yet even this valued old friend is apt to be untidy in the sit of his feathers, to perch in a melancholy brown study with de- flected tail, and to utter the same old song all the spring and summer through. This song, however (if indeed it can be called one), is a much better one than that of the Corn Bunting, and is occasionally even a little varied. 1 Just below, on an alder branch or withy-sapling, sits a fine cock Reed Bunting, whose jet-black head and white neck make him a conspicuous object in spite of the sparrow-like brown of his back and wings. Except in plumage, he is exactly like his relations. He will sit there, as long as you like to stay, and shuffling his feathers, give out his odd tentative and half-hearted song. 1 See Note B at the end of. the volume. 150 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. Like the others he builds on or close to the ground, in this case but a few yards from the rails, and his wife, like theirs, lays eggs streaked and lined in that curious way that is peculiar to Buntings alone. I have not had personal experi- ence of our rarer Buntings, the Ortolan, the Snow Bunting, or even the Cirl Bunting, as living birds ; but all the members of this curious race seem to have the characteristics mentioned above in a greater or less degree, and also a certain hard knob in the upper mandible of the bill, which is said to be used as a grindstone for the grain and seeds which are the food of them all in the adult state. Keeping yet awhile to the railway, let us notice that even the station itself meets with some patronage from the birds. In the stacks of coal which are built up close to the siding, the Pied Wagtails occasionally make their nests, fitting them into some hospitable hole or crevice. These, like all other nests found in or about the station, are carefully protected by the employes of the company. In a deep hole in the masonry of the bridge which crosses the line a few yards Preference for Railways. 151 below the station, a pair of Great Titmice built their nest two years ago, and successfully brought up their young, regardless of the puffing and rattling of the trains, for the hole was in the inside of the bridge, and only some six feet from the rails of the down line. A little coppice, remnant of a larger wood cut down to make room for the railway, still harbours immense numbers of birds ; here for example I always hear the ringing note of the Lesser Whitethroat ; and here, until a few years ago, a Nightingale rejoiced in the density of the overgrown underwood. A Ring-ousel, the only specimen, alive or dead, which I have seen or heard of in these parts, was found dead here one morning some years ago, having come into collision with the telegraph wires in the course of its nocturnal migration. It was preserved and stuffed by the station- master, who showed it to me as a piebald Blackbird. A little further down the line is another bridge, in which a Blue-tit found a hole for its nest last year ; this also was in the inside of the bridge, 152 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. and close to the up-line. This bridge is a good place from which to watch the Tree-pipit, and listen to its charming song. All down the line, wherever it passes a wood or a succession of tall elms and ashes, these little grayish-brown birds build their nest on or close to the grassy banks, and take their station on the trees or the telegraph-wires to watch, to sing, and to enjoy themselves. A favourite plan of theirs is to utter their bright canary-like song from the very top twig of an elm, then to rise in the air, higher and higher, keeping up their energies by a quick succession of sweet shrill notes, till they begin to descend in a beautiful curve, the legs hanging down, the tail expanded and inclined upwards, and the notes getting quicker and quicker as they near the telegraph-wires or the next tree-top. When they reach the perching-place, it ceases altogether. So far as I have noticed, the one part of the song is given when the bird is on the tree, the other when it is on the wing. The perching-song, if I may call it so, is possessed by no other kind of Pipit ; but the notes uttered on the wing are much the same with all the species. The Pipits. 153 The young student of birds may do well to concentrate his attention for awhile on the Pipits, and on their near relations, the Larks and the Wagtails. These three seemed to form a clearly- defined group ; and though in the latest scientific classification the Larks have been removed to some distance from the other two (which form a single family of Motacillidac}, it must be borne in mind that this is in consequence only of a single though remarkable 'point of difference. Apart from definite structural characters, a very little observation will show that their habits are in most respects alike. They all place their nests on the ground ; and they all walk, instead of hopping ; the Larks and the Pipits sing in the air, while the Pipits and the Wagtails move their tails up and down in a peculiar manner. All are earth-loving birds, except the Tree-pipit and the Woodlark. We may now leave the railway, and enter the woodland. Most of the birds that dwell here have been already mentioned ; and I shall only mention in passing the Jays, the Magpies, and the Crows, those mischievous and predatory birds, 154 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. which probably do more harm to the game in a single week of April or May, than the beautiful mice-eating Kestrel does during the whole year. They all rob the nests of the pheasants and partridges, both of eggs and young ; and when I saw one day in the wood the bodies of some twenty robbers hung up on a branch, all belong- ing to these three species, I could not but feel that justice had been done, for it is not only game birds who are their victims. A large increase of these three species would probably have a serious result on the smaller winged population of a wood. Among the more interesting inhabitants of the wood, there are two species which have not as yet been spoken of in these chapters the Grass- hopper Warbler and the Nightingale. The former has no right to be called a warbler, except in so far as it belongs to one of those three families mentioned in a former chapter, in which all our British ' warblers ' are now included. It has no song, properly so called ; but no one who has the luck to watch it alive, even without a detailed examination of its structure, will doubt its true A Grasshopper Warbler. 155 relationship to the Sedge-warbler and the Reed- warbler. It is not a water-haunting bird, but still rather recalls the ways of its relations, by choosing deep ditches thickly grown with grass and reeds, 156 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. and sheltered by bramble-bushes ; it seems to need something to climb up and down, and to creep about in ; like the sedge-birds, it seldom flies any distance, and one is tempted to fancy that all these species would gradually lose the use of their wings as genuine organs of flight, if it were not for the yearly necessities of migration. I once had a remarkable opportunity of watch- ing this very curious bird. It was about the beginning of May, before the leaves had fully come out ; a time which is very far the best in the year for observing the smaller and shyer birds. Intent on pairing or nest-build- ing, they have little fear, if you keep quite quiet, and you can follow their movements with a glass without danger of losing sight of them in the foliage. I was returning from a delicious morning ramble through Bruerne wood, and was just rounding the last corner of it, where a small plantation of baby saplings was just be- ginning to put on leaf, when my ear caught the unmistakable ' reel ' of this bird. Some other birds of the warbler kind, Wren, Robin, Sedge- A Grasshopper Warbler. 157 bird, can produce a noise like the winding-up of a watch, but none of these winds it up with such rapidity, or keeps it going so long as the Grass- hopper Warbler, nor does any cricket or grass- hopper perform the feat in exactly the same way. Our bird's noise we cannot call it a voice is like that of a very well-oiled fisherman's reel, 1 made to run at a very rapid rate, and its local name of the ' reel-bird ' is a perfectly just and good one. I was on the outside of a little hedge, and the noise proceeded from the saplings on its further side. In order to see the bird I must get over the hedge, which could not be done without a scrunching and crackling of branches sufficient to frighten away a much less wary bird than this. There seemed, however, to be no other chance of getting a sight of the bird, so through the hedge I went ; and tumbled down on the other side with such a disturbance of the branches that I gave up all hope of attaining my object. 1 Or like a delicate electric bell, heard at some distance^ while the door of your room is slowly opened and again closed. 158 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. Great was my astonishment when I saw only a few yards from me a little olive-brown bird creep- ing through the saplings, which I knew at once to be the Grasshopper Warbler. I then took up a fixed position, the little bird after a minute or two proceeded to do the same, and for some time I watched it with my glass, as it sat on a twig and continued to utter its reel. It was only about ten paces from me, and the field-glass which I carried placed it before me as completely as if it had been in my hands. What struck me most about it was its long supple olive-green neck, which was thrust out and again contracted as the reel was being produced ; this being possibly, as I fancy, the cause of the strange ventriloquistic power which the bird seems to possess ; for even while I watched it, as the neck was turned from side to side, the noise seemed to be projected first in one direction and then in another. 1 The reel was uttered at intervals, and as a general rule did not continue for more than a quarter of a minute, 1 Another cause is doubtless the crescendo and diminuendo which the bird uses : see a valuable note in The Birds of Cum- berland, by the Rev. H. A. Macpherson and W. Duckworth. A Grasshopper Warbler. 159 but one spell of it lasted for forty seconds by my watch. It is said to continue sometimes for as much as twenty minutes, but I have never been fortunate enough to hear it for anything approach- ing to that length of time. Our interview was not to last very long. It unluckily happened that my little terrier, who ac- companies me in all my walks, and is trained to come to heel when anything special is to be ob- served, had been out of sight when I broke the hedge ; and now he must needs come poking and snuffing through the saplings just as if a Grass- hopper Warbler were as fair game as a mole or a water rat. Nevertheless, so astonishing was the boldness of this bird that he allowed the clog to hunt about for some time around him without being in the least disconcerted. 1 When at last he made off he retreated in excellent order, merely half flying, half creeping with his fan-like tail dis- tended, until he disappeared in the thick under- wood. I would have taken the dog under my 1 In May this year (1886) I nearly trod upon a pair of these birds, near the same wood : yet they sho .ved no fear, allowed me to approach them within six paces, and continued to reel close at hand. 1 60 Midland Village : Railway and Woodland. arm and tried for another interview, which no doubt he would have given me, if I had not been obliged to depart in order to catch a train to Oxford. This bird was undoubtedly a male who was awaiting the arrival of the females : just at this time they not only betray themselves more easily by the loudness of their reel, but also are well known to be less shy of showing themselves than at any other period of their stay with us. This is the case with most of our summer migrants. Only a few minutes before I found this bird, I had been watching a newly-arrived cock Nightingale, who had not yet found his mate, and was content to sing to me from the still leafless bough of an oak-tree, without any of the shyness he would have shown two or three weeks later. We have every spring a few pairs of Nightin- gales in our woods. Except when a wood has been cleared of its undergrowth, they may always be found in the same places, and if the accus- tomed pair is missing in one it is almost sure to be found in another. The edge of a wood is the favourite place, because the bird constantly seeks The Nightingale, 161 its food in the open ; also perhaps because the best places for the nest are often in the depth of an overgrown hedge, where the cover is thicker than inside a wood. Sitting on the sunny side of such a wood, I have often had ample oppor- tunity of hearing and watching a pair : for though always somewhat shy, they are not frightened at a motionless figure, and will generally show them- selves if you wait for them, on some prominent bough or bit of railing, or as they descend on the meadow in quest of food. I am always surprised that writers on birds have so little to say of the beauty of the Nightin- gale's form and colouring. It is of the ideal size for a bird, neither too small to be noticed readily, nor so large as the somewhat awkwardly built Blackbird or Starling. All its parts are in exquisite proportion ; its length of leg gives it a peculiarly sprightly mien, and tail and neck are formed to a perfect balance. Its plumage, as seen, not in an ornithologist's cabinet, but in the living and moving bird a little distance from you, is of three hues, all sober, but all possessing that reality of colour which is so sat'sfying to the 1 62 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. eye on a sunny day. The uniform brown of the head, the wings, and the upper part of the back, is much like the brown of the Robin, a bird which in some other respects strangely resembles the Nightingale ; but either it is a little brighter, or the larger surface gives it a richer tone. In both birds the brown is set off against a beautiful red ; but this in the Nightingale is only distinct when it flies or jerks the tail, the upper feathers of which, as well as the longer quills, and especially the innermost ones, are of that deep but bright russet that one associates with an autumn morning. And throat and breast are white ; not pure white, but of the gentle tone of a cloud where the gray begins to meet the sunshine. In habit the Nightingale is peculiarly alert and quick, not restless in a petty way, like the fidgety Titmice or the lesser warblers, but putting a certain seriousness and intensity into all it does. Its activity is neither grotesque nor playful, but seems to arise from a kind of nervous zeal, which is also characteristic of its song. If it perches for an instant on the gorse-bush beneath the hedge- row which borders the wood, it jerks its tail up, The Nightingale. 1.63 expands its wings, and is off in another moment. If it alights on the ground, it rears up head and neck like a thrush, hops a few paces, listens, darts upon some morsel of food, and does not dally with it. As it sings, its whole body vibrates, and the soft neck feathers ripple to the quivering cf the throat. I need not attempt to describe that wonderful song, if song it is, and not rather an impassioned recitative. The poets are often sadly to seek about it ; Wordsworth at least seems to have caught its spirit : " O Nightingale, thou surely art A creature of a fiery heart." And Wordsworth, as he tells us in the next stanza, found the cooing of the stock-dove more agreeable to his pensive mind. I never yet heard a Night- ingale singing dolefully, as the poets will have it sing; 1 its varied phrases are all given out con brio, and even that marvellous crescendo on a single 1 As in Milton's "most musical, most melancholy." But as Coleridge remarks in a note to his own poem of the Night- ingale, in Sibylline Leaves, these words of Milton are spoken in the character of the melancholy man, and have therefore a dramatic rather than a descriptive propriety. Coleridge's own conception of the song is the true one and most happily expressed. M 2 164 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. note, which no other bird attempts, conveys to the mind of the listener the fiery intensity of the high-strung singer. It is a pity to compare the songs of birds ; our best singers, Thrush, Black- bird, Blackcap, Robin, and Garden-warbler, all have a vocal beauty of their own ; but it may safely be said that none approaches the Night- ingale in fire and fervour of song, or in the combination of extraordinary power with variety of phrase. He seems to do what he pleases with his voice, yet never to play with it ; so earnest is he in every utterance and these come at intervals, sometimes even a long silence making the performance still more mysterious that if I were asked how to distinguish his song from the rest, I should be inclined to tell my questioner to wait by a wood side till he is fairly startled by a bird that puts his whole ardent soul into his song. But if he will have a description, let him go to old Pliny's tenth book, or rather to Philemon Holland's translation of it, which is much better reading than the original ; and there he will find the most enthusiastic of the many futile attempts to describe the indescribable. Bird Life in July. 165 The Nightingale's voice is heard no more after mid-June ; and from this time onwards the woods begin to grow silent, especially after early morning. For a while the Blackcap breaks the stillness, and his soft sweet warble is in perfect keeping with the quiet solitude. But as the heat increases, the birds begin to feel, as man does, that the shade of a thick wood is more oppressive than the bright sunshine of the meadows ; and on a hot afternoon in July you may walk through the woodland and hardly catch a single note. But on the outskirts of a wood, or in a grassy 'ride,' you may meet with life again. The Tit- mice will come crooning around you, appearing suddenly, and vanishing you hardly know T how or whither ; Wood-pigeons will dash out of the trees with that curious impetuosity of theirs, as if they were suddenly sent for on most pressing business. A Robin will perch on a branch hard by, and startle you with that pathetic soliloquy which calls up instantly to your memory the damp mist and de- caying leaves of last November. The Green Woodpecker may be there, laughing at you from an elm, or possibly (as I have sometimes seen him) 1 66 Midland Village: Railway and Woodland. feeding on the ground, and looking like a gorgeous bird of the tropics. Other birds of the Woodpecker kind are not common in our woods. The Greater Spotted Woodpecker has only once fairly shown himself to me ; the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, which I have heard country folk call the French Heckle, seldom catches the eye, 1 though to judge by the number of stuffed specimens which adorn the parlours of inns and farm-houses, it can by no means be very rare. For this name ' heckle,' and all its curious local variants, I may refer the reader to Professor Skeat's most valuable etymological contribution to Newton's Edition of Yarreirs Birds ^ but why, one may ask, should it be called the French Heckle ? A very old game- keeper, who described to me by this name a bird which was certainly the Lesser Spotted Wood- pecker, also used the expression English Heckle 1 A Woodpecker on a railway bridge is a curiosity. But a Lesser Spotted bird was once seen on the stonework of the bridge which spans the Chipping Norton branch line, by the Rev. S. D. Lockwood, Rector of my parish, who knows the bird well. 2 Vol. ii. pp. 461-463. Hickwall seems to be the recognized orthography ; but I spell the word as it was pronounced. The Wood-warbler. 167 for the Wryneck a bird (he said) much plainer than the French Heckle, and apt to hiss at you if you try to take its eggs. I imagine that French is here contrasted with English to indicate superior brightness and dapperness of plumage. There is yet one bird of our woods or rather of one wood, thickly planted with oaks of which I have as yet said nothing. I had long suspected his presence in that wood, but my search for him was always in vain. One clay in May, 1888, I luckily turned down a little by-path which led me through a forest of young ashes, and brought me out into a wide clearing carpeted with blue-bells and overshadowed by tall oaks. Here I heard a sibilant noise, which in the distance I had taken for the Grasshopper Warbler ; though I had had doubts of it, as it was not prolonged for more than two or three seconds. Now also I heard, from the thick wood beyond the clearing, a series of plaintive notes, something like those of the Tree Pipit, and this stopped me again as I was turning away. I listened, and heard these notes repeated several times, feeling more and more certain each time that I had heard them before in 1 68 Midland Village : Railway and Woodland. this very wood, and suspected them to be the call-notes of the Wood-warbler, a bird with which, strangely enough, I had never had any personal acquaintance. The sibilant noise was all this time going on close at hand. The wood was comparatively silent owing to the east wind, and I could con- centrate my attention on these new voices without distraction. I noticed that the sibilation was pre- ceded by three or four slightly longer and more distinct notes, and as this answered to my book- knowledge of the Wood-warbler, I became more and more anxious to see the bird. But he would not let me see him. And then came the puzzling plaintive notes again, as different as possible from the sibilant ones, and it became absolutely neces- sary to discover whether they were uttered by the same creature. At last I thought I had made sure of the bird in one particular little thicket not more than ten or twelve yards from me, and crept on as softly as possible out of the clearing into the underwood. Of course the dead twigs crackled under my feet and the branches had to be put forcibly aside, and The Wood-warbler. 169 the voice retreated as I neared it. I thought of a certain morning in the Alps, and of a provoking and futile hunt after Bonelli's Warbler ; but push- ing on a little further into a small open space, I stopped once more, and then firmly resolved not to move again. I had a long time to wait. Sometimes the plaintive voice, but oftener the sibilant notes, would be uttered quite close to me, and the singer would stay for some time in the same bush, hidden from my sight, but near at hand. And at last, as a fisherman sees the surface of the smooth black pool in an instant broken, and then feels his fish, I caught sight of a momentary motion in the leaves not ten yards away from me. A minute later I saw the bird, and knew at once that I had the Wood-warbler before me. There was nothing now to do but to stand motionless and see more of it. By degrees it seemed to grow used to my presence, and showed itself to me without any sign of alarm. What can be more delightful than to watch in perfect solitude and security the bird you have been looking for so long ? There was the yellow throat, the delicate white breast, the i /o Midland Village : Railway and Woodland. characteristic streak over the eye all plainly visible as he sat facing me ; and when he kindly turned his tail to me and preened his feathers, I could see the greenish-brown back, and note the unusual length of wing. Several times, when close to me, he gave utterance to that curious ' shivering ' sibilation (to use Gilbert White's apt word), his bill opening wide to give the last shake, his head lifted upwards, the long wings quivering slightly, and the whole body vibrating under the effort. One thing more was needed a visible proof that the long-drawn plaintive notes were his notes too, and this I had the pleasure of securing by a little more patience. But when my little warbler uttered these notes, his bill was not opened wide, nor did his frame vibrate with any apparent effort ; they seemed rather an inward soliloquy or a secret signal (as indeed they were), and always ended up with a short note and a sudden closing of the bill, as if to say, " All's right, that's well over." Then behind me I heard the undoubted double call-note of a warbler, which probably I myself caused the little bird's wife to utter, trespassing The Haunts of Linnet and Goldfinch. 171 as I surely was in the neighbourhood of the nest. It did just cross my mind that I ought to search for that nest,' but I gave up the idea almost at once, and bade adieu in peace to my new friends. They had shown themselves to me without fear, and they should have no reason to dislike me. Beyond the woods where these birds live, we come out on scrubby fields, often full of thistles, and spotted with furze-bushes. These fields are the special favourites of the Linnets and Gold- finches ; the Linnets are in great abundance, the latter, since the Wild Birds' Act came into operation, by no means uncommon in autumn. We cannot but pause again and again as we make our way through the gorse and brushwood, for the little Linnet in his full summer dress is hardly less beautiful than the Goldfinch, and all his ways and actions are no less cheering and attractive. The male birds differ much, perhaps according to age, in brilliancy of plumage ; but a fine cock Linnet in full dress of crimson breast and crown, white wing-bars and tail-feathers, and chestnut back, is to my thinking as splendid a little bird as these islands can show. I can never 1 72 Midland Village : Railway and Woodland. forget the astonishment of a companion who hardly knew the bird, when I pointed him out a Linnet in this splendid costume one July day on a Radnorshire hill. The ground now rises towards the hills which form the limit of our western horizon. On these hills may now and then be seen a few birds which we seldom meet with in the lower grounds, such as the Stone-chat, the Brambling, the Wheatear ; but as the hills are for the most part cultivated, and abound in woods and brooks, the difference between the bird life of the uplands and the low- lands is not remarkable at any time of the year. It may be worth while, however, to note down in outline the chief movements of the birds in our district in the course of a single year. In Janu- ary, which is usually the coldest month in the year, the greater number of our birds are collected in flocks in the open country, the villages only retaining the ordinary Blackbirds, Thrushes, Robins, &c. The winter migrants are in great numbers in the fields, but they and almost all other birds will come into villages and even into towns in very severe weather. In February, Local Migration. 173 villages, orchards, and gardens are beginning to receive more of the bird population, while the great flocks are beginning to break up under the influence of the approach of spring. In March the same process goes on more rapidly ; the fields are becoming deserted and the gardens fuller. But meanwhile hedges, woods, thickets and streams are filling with a population from beyond the seas, some part of which penetrates even into the gardens, sharing the fruit-trees with the resi- dents, or modestly building their nests on the ground. As a rule, though one of a very general kind, it may be laid down that our resident birds prefer the neighbourhood of mankind for nesting purposes, while the summer migrants build chiefly in the thickets and hedges of the open country ; so that just at the time when Chaffinches, Green- finches, Goldfinches, and a host of other birds are leaving the open country for the precincts of the village, their places are being taken by the new arrivals of the spring. Or if this rule be too imperfect to be worth calling a rule at all (for all the Swallow kind but one British species build in human habitations), it is at least true that if a T 74 Midland Village : Railway and Woodland. garden offers ample security for nesting, the pro- portion of residents to migrants taking advantage of it will be much greater than in a wood or on a heath. Just as the population of the open country begins to decrease in numbers in early spring, so it increases rapidly in* the first weeks of summer. The young broods that have spent their infancy in or near the village now seek more extended space and richer supplies of food, and when the hay is cut, they may be found swarming in all adjacent hedges and on the prostrate swathes, while the gardens are comparatively empty. But before July is over an attentive watcher will find that his garden is visited by birds which were not born and bred there ; while the residents are away in the fields, the migrants begin to be attracted to the gardens by the ripening fruits of all kinds. White-throats, Willow-warblers, Chiff-chaffs, haunt the kitchen-garden for a while, then leave it on their departure for the coast and their journey southwards. After this last little migration, the villages and gardens remain almost deserted except by the Blackbirds and Thrushes, Local Migration. 175 the Robins and the Wrens, until the winter drives the wilder birds to seek the neighbourhood of man once more. Even then, unless the garden be well timbered, they will be limited to a very Out-door relief. few species, except in the hardest weather ; and it is remarkable how little variety will be found among our winter pensioners those recipients of out-door relief, who spoil their digestions by j 76 Midland Village : Railway and Woodland. becoming greedy over a food which is not natural to them. This rough attempt to sketch the local migra- tions of birds must be understood as applying to my own village only, and to gardens which are not surrounded with extensive parks. CHAPTER VI. THE ALPS IN SEPTEMBER. S I observed in a former chapter, the movements of the birds of the Alps are, or ought to be, of very great interest to the ornithologist, owing partly to the wonderful variety of food and climate afforded by the gigantic 178 The Alps in September. structure of this mountain district, and partly to its geographical position, lying as it does in the very centre of the various routes of migration in spring and autumn. I had long been anxious to obtain some more reliable information about these movements than I had acquired when my third chapter was written, and to obtain it as far as possible at first hand ; and I eagerly seized the opportunity, in September of the present year (1886), of a visit to relations in Germany, to make a rapid de'tour to the Alps, about the time when the more delicate birds would be beginning to leave the higher valleys and pastures, now fast becoming too cold at night to suit their tender frames. I was able to remain only a very few days, but I saw and heard enough to occupy my attention fully during that short time, and am disposed to hope that by setting down my experiences I may attract the attention of autumn travellers to a matter which lends new interest to a hackneyed region, after the flowers have disappeared, and when the days are getting too short for ambitious mountain-climbing. I arrived at Lucerne on the morning of Swiss Geography. 179 September 16, and went on at once to Alpnacht, at the extreme end of the south-western arm of the lake, having on my left the starting-point of our former walk. I did not expect to see any- thing of autumn migration quite so early as this, or I should have taken the St. Gotthard line direct to the great tunnel, and then have estab- lished myself at once at or near the head of the Reuss valley which the railway follows ; but I wished to see what birds were still to be found in the lower levels, and determined to spend a day or two in the great valley of Hasli, where I left my. reader at the end of my third chapter. Before I take him further on this second round of exploration, I must ask him to look with me at a map of Switzerland, in order that we may under- stand the geographical conditions of the problem about which I was now going to try and learn a little. A little study of a good map will show that the true alpine region of Switzerland proper consists of two enormous mountain barriers, fencing in, to north and south, a deep trench, nearly a hundred miles in length. This trench represents the N 2 180 The Alps in September. valleys of the Rhine and Rhone, which start within a short distance of each other, and are only interrupted for a few miles, " in the very centre of the region, by the upper part of the valley of the river Reuss, which here forms a kind of elevated plain, enclosed, like the trench itself, between vast mountains ; this plain is the bed of an ancient lake, which once escaped from its prison through a narrow opening at the eastern end, where the Devils' Bridge now stands. On the northern side of the trench, throughout its whole length, the mountain barrier is pierced by ordinary summer routes at three points only : beginning from the west, at the Gemmi Pass, north of the Rhone, where the opening is artificial rather than natural ; at the Grimsel Pass, which debouches upon the source of the Rhone in its Glacier ; and at the point mentioned just now, where the lake made its escape, and where a tunnel driven through the rock has taken the place of an ancient hanging bridge. Nothing can be more striking to a geographical eye than the fact that from the point where it abuts upon the lake of Geneva (where communication is of course Bird-catching on the Alps. 181 easier) to the point where the Rhine curves round to the north at Chur, the northern barrier of the trench offers only these three passages to the ordinary human traveller. The southern rampart, though for the most part broader, and including the highest European peaks, admits the traveller southward at several points, and is pierced by two excellent carriage roads, those of the Simplon and the St. Gotthard. During the summer, the parts of Switzerland north of the trench and its two barriers, are occupied by countless fragile birds, which have come from Africa over Italy, and must return there in the autumn. How do they come, and how do they return ? Of their arrival I have had no personal experience, and shall therefore say nothing ; for it does not follow that birds always come and go in exactly the same manner and by exactly the same route. But of the departure of some of them I can now tell something, having had the evidence of my own eyes that a double barrier such as I have described is not a fatal obstacle to their progress. The main facts of the migration have indeed been long known, and only 1 82 The Alps in September. too well known, to the inhabitants of the district ; for the people of Canton Tessin, which consists of the valleys to the south of the central part of the Alps, sharing the tastes of their neighbours the Italians, were until a few years ago in the habit of lying in wait for the birds, and snaring them in vast numbers. When the hold of the Central Federal Government over the individual Cantons was made stronger a few years ago, the same absolute prohibition of wanton slaughter was extended to this canton, which had long been respected in the others ; and in spite of a cantonal appeal to be allowed to revert to the old licence, the " Bund " held its own, and succeeded in pro- tecting the migrants. No bird may now be killed at any time of the year in any part of Switzerland, without either a game licence, of which the cost is considerable, or a permission to procure specimens for a scientific object. We took no gun with us on this occasion, being more anxious to observe movements than to identify species. My plan was, after noting the bird-population of the lower levels, which we called Region No. i, to pass through the northern In seardi of Summer Migrants. 183 barrier by the Grimsel or the St. Gotthard, and take my station at the head of one of these passes, in the highest ground of the great trench, and there to look about me, and also to make inquiries about the 'Vogelzug.' Accordingly, after leaving the lake of Lucerne, I turned in the direction of the great valley of the Aar, or Haslithal, which leads up to the Grimsel Pass, knowing that at Meiringen, which lies in the flat of it, not far from its issue into the lake of Brienz, I should be able to see almost in a single walk what summer migrants were still to be found in it. But I halted for the night at the beautiful village of Lungern, in order to enjoy the walk over to the Haslithal in the early morning of the next day ; and here I was met by my old friend Anderegg, who was as eager as myself for a week of diligent observation. The next morning was one of those which seem to stir the hearts of all living creatures, urging them to the enjoyment of autumn warmth while it lasts, and to the pursuit of food while it is still abundant. We had hardly entered the first pine- wood when Anderegg detected the querulous 184 The Alps in September, sibilation of the Crested Tit, and two minutes later we had a little family around us, searching the fir-branches without showing any anxiety at our presence. Shortly afterwards a pair of Ravens passed over us, twisting themselves round as they flew through the morning mist, in a peculiar way, and without any object as far as I could see ; and at the same moment a small party of Crossbills on the very top of a pine began to chatter with indignation at the appearance of a possible enemy. A few minutes later my sharp-eared companion heard the voices of the Great Black Woodpecker and of the Greater Spotted Woodpecker (Schild- specht) ; but the forest was here so large and dense that we were obliged to move on without seeing either. Passing slowly upwards, and en- livened by the close neighbourhood of Jays, Nutcrackers, Missel-thrushes, and by the occa- sional song of both Robin and Wren, we arrived near the highest point of the Briinig carriage-road, where it runs for some distance almost at a level, and is carried along the side of a steep ascent, the hollow below it being covered with under- growth stretching down to sunny meadows, while Birds on the Brunig Pass. 185 the pine-forest rises above it sharp and dense. A better position for an ornithologist could hardly be desired ; for as he stands at the edge of the road his eye must catch every movement in the bushes below him, while his ear commands for a considerable distance the pine-wood above him. Here I walked up and down for some time, scanning the multitudinous Cole-tits and Marsh- tits which were playing in the cover below the road, and mentally comparing their plumage with that of our British forms of the same species ; and while thus occupied, a Great Black Woodpecker, the first I had ever seen alive, hove in sight and fixed himself on a pine at no great distance, en- abling me to watch him for some time with my strongest glass, as he went to work on the bark, now and again twisting his head round watchfully, like a Wryneck, and giving me an excellent view of his powerful bill. Presently, with rapid wing- strokes, like those of the Green Woodpecker, he flew over our heads, and was lost in the forest above us. As he flies, he utters a series of laugh- ing notes, and often gives out a prolonged call after settling on a tree. He is a very fine and 1 86 The Alps in September. remarkable bird ; as large, said Anderegg, as a fowl, using precisely the same comparison which occurred to Aristotle two thousand years ago. We then descended rapidly into the Haslithal, where I spent one whole day in noting such of its feathered inhabitants as had not already deserted it, or were likely to stay in it during the winter. The most remarkable feature of this broad and flat hollow in the hills, is the river Aar, which has been artificially confined for several miles within a strong stone embankment. On this particular day the stonework on each side was literally alive with Wagtails ; the left bank seemed almost ex- clusively occupied by the gray species, and the right bank by the white. All these were con- tinually flying out over the swift glacier water, hovering for a few moments as they sought for flies, and then retiring to their station on the bank; and this was going on for the length of a full mile between the two bridges, so that the whole number of Wagtails must have been enormous. I could hardly avoid the conclusion that these birds had collected in view of migration. The Gray Wag- tail, Anderegg tells me, is never to be seen here Carrion Crows. 187 in the winter, and the white species seldom ; but as to what becomes of them I am unable as yet to be sure. Perhaps they simply move down the river into the lower and warmer districts of western and northern Switzerland ; just as in England also there is a general movement of Wagtails in the autumn from the more mountainous dis- tricts into the regions of plain and meadow. Another unusual sight was the vast assembly of Carrion Crows, which gathered in the evening, first to drink (not in the rushing Aar, but in a stream quiet enough to give me a momentary view of a Kingfisher) ; then to perch on a number of small fruit-trees, and finally to wheel" round and round among the pines and precipices, until they settled down to roost for the night. But for their voices and their black bills, it was hard to believe that they were not rooks ; but no rook was visible, and this bird seems almost unknown in the valley. After seeing this strange sight, I find it hard to assent to the universally accepted proposition, that the Crow is never, strictly speaking, a gregarious bird. So constant is their habit here of roosting together, that Anderegg told me that he had more 1 88 The Alps in September. than once, when out hunting at night, been almost deafened with the noise they made when threatened by the gigantic Eagle-owl. Of the ordinary summer birds there were few to be seen, though the weather was warm for Sep- tember. The Chiff-chaff sang now and then from the hotel garden, and a certain number of Willow- warblers were still about the beans and flax in the fields ; Bonelli's Warbler (see p. 109) I was quite unable to detect. There were a few Swallows, House-martins, and Crag-martins ; Goldfinches in fair abundance, very busy with seeds in the cultivated land ; a few Robins, and a solitary Whinchat. I began to fear that I had come too late to witness any considerable migration ; for even the Black Redstart, the representative bird of these valleys in summer, was in much smaller numbers than usual. Even the Starlings had all departed to a bird, not to return till March. On the other hand, the birds of the higher regions were already showing a disposition to come down to lower levels ; among these the most interesting were the Nutcrackers (often in company with Jays) and the Crossbills. These last-mentioned birds, Crossbills on top of pine. p. 189 Crossbills at Breakfast. 189 which are so seldom to be seen in England, were now to be found in the lowest instead of the highest pinewoods, in pairs or in small companies, giving warning of their presence by a rapidly repeated alarm-note. Generally they were on the very top twigs of a pine, where it was difficult to obtain a good sight of them ; but one morning Anderegg's son, who is beginning to pick up his father's powers of observation, detected a pair on a pine below us, which both his elders had passed by unheeding. They were breakfasting each on the seeds of a cone, and I was able to observe with the glass how admirably the crossed man- dibles are adapted for cutting into the heart of the fruit. The plumage of the male was a sober red, less brilliant than it will be next spring ; and the female's dull greenish colouring was hardly re- cognizable against the pines. The presence of these birds close down to the valleys denoted the rapid approach of a cold season, and it became plain that if I were to catch the southward migrants I must hasten upwards towards St. Gotthard. This I determined to do by the shortest possible route, crossing the Susten Pass eastwards into the J 9 The Alps in September. Reuss valley at Wasen, and so getting easily to the highest point of the great trench. The Alps have a beauty of their own in Sep- tember, even when there are few flowers left, and the snow has long disappeared in all the highest pastures. This is the time when the second crop of grass is cut ; and the mowing leaves a short and beautiful mossy golden turf, which shines brightly in the sun, and lies softly and smoothly where a pine or a boulder casts its shadow on the ground. The walk through the Gadmenthal up to the Susten Pass was one to be remembered for beauty, though not ornithologically productive. The only curiosity that I saw was a Creeper running up a house ; a very natural proceeding on the part of the bird, where the houses are of wood, containing abundance of insects in the crannies. 1 The great curiosity of the valley, the 1 They will often build their nests in holes in the timber of the houses. Anderegg tells me that this was the case in his own house two years ago. Nor is this the only instance of the habits of birds being affected by the nature of the house- architecture in these parts ; for the House-martins, being unable (I suppose) to make their nests adhere securely against timber, or disliking the large projecting eaves, build in the Haslithal The GadmentJial. 191 three-toed Woodpecker, whose ' fatherland ' (as Anderegg called it) is among the highest pine- woods at the head of the valley, would not show himself ; though in the village of Gadmen we were told by an inhabitant that he had lately seen no less than seven of this species a whole family, I suppose on a single tree. Perhaps they too had come downwards in expectation of the winter. Alpine autumn was indeed around us, and at Gadmen we saw the first signs of the general migration of man, beast, and bird, which takes place at this time of year. A flock of sheep, which had been all the summer on the elevated Wendenalp, had just come down, and was being penned in front of the inn as we arrived. Great part of the population of the valley had assembled to claim their own, and when the penning was done all plunged into the living mass, men, women, boys, and sheep being mixed up in one confused struggle. Anxiety sat upon their faces, for no under ledges of rock, and are known there as the Rock-martin, as distinct from the Rock-swallow (Felsenschwalbe), which is the name there given to the Crag-mart'n. It is well-known that there are places even in England where this bird prefers rocks to houses. 1 92 The Alps in September. man knows whether he shall find his own sheep ; some wander away and are lost, and some few a fact of interest to me are not too big to be carried off by the Golden Eagles that dwell in the vast precipices of the Titlis above the valley. Above Gadmen the valley rapidly narrows, soon becoming little more than a cleft in the mountains, until it opens out into a pleasant little basin of uneven rocky pasture, much of which has been eaten away by a great mass of glacier which has descended into it within the present century, and is now again rapidly retreating. In this little basin the Stein-alp, as it is appropriately called is an excellent little inn ; and here is the very place to catch the migrants of the Hasli and Gad- men valleys, if they should be passing this way ; for the narrowing of the glen below must bring them all into this little basin, before they rise to the final ascent immediately above the inn. On the morning of September 1 7, as I was greeting Anderegg, and suggesting to him that we should make a second attempt to find the rare Wood- pecker, he informed me with animation that he had seen, first a large collection of small Finches Migration at the Stein-alp. 193 flying overhead, and secondly, a great number of Pipits assembled on the Alp a few minutes' walk from the house. We at once went to look for these, but they had all disappeared ; and we con- tinued our walk downwards in search of the Wood- pecker. But we had not gone far when our attention was attracted by a flock of Redstarts, working slowly upwards a little above the path ; and turning back again, we followed these for some distance, assuring ourselves that they were no accidental assembly, but must be on their way to the head of the pass, and so onwards to the line of St. Gotthard into Italy. As we arrived again at the inn, we saw the flock of little birds which Anderegg had described in the morning ; they were still about the inn, but so restless and so playful that even with a strong glass I could not be certain of their species. My own impression was that they were Redpolls ; Anderegg, however, positively asserted that he had caught the voice of Citril and Serin Finches. I now proposed that we should mount to the top of the pass, in order to observe whether the birds we had noticed in flocks lower down were o 194 The Alps in September. still making way upwards. The result of this movement was that we found the Pipits all Alpine-pipits (see p. 93), as far as I could ascertain in a sunny hollow just above the glacier ; they were there in great numbers, but did not mount further so long as we remained. The Redstarts too we found still slowly working upwards on the same side of the valley on which we had seen them in the morning ; they were now just opposite to the glacier. But on the top of the pass, where it was too cold to stay long, we saw no signs of migrants ; it was occupied only by a few Alpine Accentors, while high above, at a height of full 9000 feet above the sea, the Alpine Choughs were enjoying the sunshine. As we were descending, I caught sight of a tiny little tarn on the opposite side of the glacier, on the rocky alp high up above the inn, which struck me as a likely place for birds, especially as it was sheltered by a little crest of stunted trees of some kind. Here, after the mid-day meal, we made our way, and finding nothing at all, lay down on the grass to enjoy a splendid view" of the craggy defile below us. But we had not been lying long before a twittering was Redpolls. 1 95 heard, and the little flock which had puzzled us in the morning came dancing overhead, and settled so deep in the stunted pines I had noticed from the top of the pass, that though we could see the movements of the branches, we could not once get a clear sight of a single individual. This was too provoking, and I at once proceeded to jrawl slowly towards the bushes, getting round to the flank of the birds on a rising bit of ground, until I was within a few yards of them. All that I saw were Redpolls, 1 and all of the ' Mealy ' form known to ornithologists ; the autumn moult had left them very white on breast and belly, and very mealy on wings and back. They were, as far as I could judge, a little larger than our British Lesser Redpoll. Were they too migrating, or were they going to spend the winter in the Gad- menthal ? I suspect that they stay all their lives in the Alps, and instead of moving southward to a warmer climate when under stress of weather, have but to make a short journey to a lower station in 1 I afterwards saw three of the same species about some stunted thistles on the Furka-pass, at a height of 8000 feet, and on a bitter cold day. See Note D. at end of Volume. O 2 196 The Alps in September. the valley, to find at once a warmer temperature and abundance of the food they seek. The next day, September 20, we packed up our baggage, and left this health-giving spot with its iced air and scented breezes, and again climbed the pass on our way to Wasen, being anxious to get to the head of the St. Gotthard before the fine weather should desert us. I was not unwilling to see my fellow-creatures again, as I had been quite alone on the Stein-alp, except for a single hour which an Englishman of education and intelligence had made very enjoyable as he took his ' Mitta gessen ' and smoked his cigarette with me As it happened, w r e left just in time to enable us, as the reader will learn shortly, to see things worth recording at Hospenthal the following clay. On going up the ascent from the inn, I noticed that the Pipits were now in great numbers at a lower level than yesterday, and this suggested the conclusion that a fresh instalment had arrived from below, while those of yesterday had gone still higher or descended on the other side. This idea was fully confirmed by what I saw afterwards ; for a good many more were at or about the top, and On the Susten Pass. 197 as we sat there for a few minutes, one flew right over us and disappeared in the depths of the valley in the direction of Wascn. All the way down too on the other side little parties were making their way in the same direction ; and thus it became clear that these birds at least do not take flight all at once, but move in a continuous stream of parties smaller or greater, much as the late Mr. A. E. Knox described the migration of the Pied Wagtails from west to east in the south coast of England, in his admirable Ornithological Rambles in Sussex. 1 But we may well ask the question, Do they arrive in the same manner ? The Susten Pass is 7000 feet above the sea, and is covered with snow from October to June. I myself once crossed it on June 29, when its deep snow bore no trace of human footsteps, and it was possible to make glissades over slopes where now not a vestige of snow was to be seen. Are we to suppose that the Pipits and their friends pass it in spring in spite of the snow, and travel in the 1 It is worth noting that Knox observed that the progress of the Pied Wagtail is chiefly observable between daybreak and 10 a.m. All the movements I noticed in the Alps were observed during the earlier morning hours. 198 The Alps in September. same gradual manner ? I cannot yet answer this question, nor is it likely that I shall ever be able to witness the arrival of the Susten Pipits as I witnessed their departure ; but I contrived in the course of a week in these regions to set a few intelligent natives in an inquiring mood with regard to these matters, and it is possible that next spring may bring me some scraps of useful information. At present I am content to remem- ber that Mr. Knox, in the passage just now referred to, was the first to discover that the arrival and departure of our English species arc not performed in exactly the same manner. We saw nothing of special ornithological interest in the melancholy Meienthal, which leads down from the Susten to the St. Gotthard railway at Wasen ; but I was reminded of a passage in my third chapter (p. 83) when we arrived at the first considerable pasture, and found a whole commu- nity of men, women, children, cows, and goats, on the very point of migrating from their cool and healthy summer home. The cows were all gathered in front of the ' Sennhiitten,' and when doors and windows had been made fast for the winter, all the A General Migration. 199 human migrants stood for a few minutes in prayer, doubtless thanking God for the provision He had made for them and their cattle, and asking for a blessing on the pasture for the summers yet to come. Then all these Catholics of Uri streamed downwards with their cows in long procession, the head ' Senner ' walking in front followed by one fine animal ; and to-day the pasture is as still and desolate as it will be all the coming winter. Even the very stream that washes it will be less voice- ful, when the first frosts have bound once more the snow that feeds and fills it through all the warm season. It was indeed most curious and interesting to find man, beast, and bird all leaving it on the same day. On arriving at Wasen, being still alarmed lest I should be too late to see much on this side of the great double barrier for it now became evident that the birds were taking advantage of the last fine weather I had half a mind to go through the tunnel to Airolo, and catch them on the southern side. My second thoughts, how- ever, were in this expedition unusually lucky, and I fortunately decided to stay for a night or two at 2OO The Alps in September. Hospenthal, which lies just at the northern mouth of the St. Gotthard Pass proper, in that curious elevated valley mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, which lies just between the two halves of the great trench formed by the valleys of the Rhine and Rhone. Any birds crossing the St. Gotthard into Italy must necessarily pass Hospenthal, and I had heard enough already of migration in this district to make me pretty con- fident of getting information here, even if I were not lucky enough to see anything myself. When -we issued from the ' Urner-loch ' into this broad and grassy valley, it was just beginning to grow dark ; but we could see great numbers of swallows and martins on the church steeples both of Andermatt and Hospenthal, which are about a mile apart. As I came down the next morning at 7 a.m., I was met by Anderegg, who informed me that the gathering on the Hospenthal steeple had left their station in a body at 6 a.m., had circled high into the air for a few minutes, and then taken a directly southward course, not by the St. Gotthard road, but over the shoulder of the mountain which separates that road from a Migration at Hospenthal. 201 parallel valley to the east of it. That this ac- count was true I was able to prove to my own satisfaction, for on the morning of the next day I was up in time to see a new party depart in precisely the same manner and the same direction. Like the Pipits, these Swallows and Martins migrate in considerable flocks coming one behind the other ; and so far as we could ascertain from walks taken during the day, these flocks occupy successively the steeples of Andermatt and Hos- penthal, coming up from the lower valley and settling first on the former, then leaving it when the other is free, and so eventually leaving that also to rise for their last flight over the great barrier. How long this process goes on I could not very clearly ascertain. But there were still young martins in the nests at Hospenthal, which would hardly be ready to fly for some days, and as we subsequently found a certain number of martins (though very few swallows) when we returned to the Haslithal, I am inclined to think that it occupies a considerable time, and differs in length according to the weather. On the occa- sion of my visit, though it was fine and warm, 2O2 The Alps in September. the barometer was falling, and the very next day a continuous rain and snow-fall set in, lasting nearly three days ; so that it seemed as if the birds were making haste to escape from a climate which might very well be dangerous to them. In Meiringen I was told that great numbers of them were caught and killed by severe weather in September last year. And the waiter in the hotel at Hospenthal, who most fortunately has some interest in these matters, and keeps his eyes open in his idle autumn hours, declared that he had seen the martins so eager to induce their young to leave the nest before it was too late, that at last they pulled them out by main force and compelled them to join the general assembly on the steeple. This same man had also noticed a migration of another kind, which it may be worth while to record here. Sitting in front of the hotel, with nothing to do, he had observed a constant stream of dragon-flies making their way up the valley ; and during my walks that day I was able fully to verify his statement. All the way from Hos- penthal to Andermatt these creatures were to be Movements of Insects. 203 seen coming up against the wind, which was now blowing from the west. Doubtless I should never have noticed them, if my attention had not been drawn to them by this most fortunately situated observer. There was no mistake about it ; count- less numbers were steadily passing up the valley, but whither they were going it was hopeless to ascertain ; they did not seem to turn up the St. Gotthard road, for I remarked them the whole way up the valley to the foot of the Furka Pass westwards. Frau Meyer, landlady of the hotel, told me that she had once witnessed an extra- ordinary flight of countless butterflies at Hos- penthal ; but could not tell me the species. I had myself previously noticed the tendency of the Apollo butterfly at the Stein-alp to fly up the pass every individual I saw being apparently on his way upwards. And this was against an cast wind, close to a glacier, and on the iQth of September ! The migrating birds, however, did not seem to get any further up the valley than Hospenthal ; and indeed at no point further up would they have found a route into Italy so comparatively free from 204 The Alps in September. difficulty. We took a walk in the afternoon in order to ascertain whether this were so, and the result was interesting. Let it be understood that at Hospenthal the St. Gotthard road turns sharp to the south up a narrow valley, while the elevated valley or plain in which Hospenthal lies extends for several miles further to the foot of the Furka Pass, which leads, not into Italy, but into the Rhone valley westwards. Exactly as the human traveller into Italy follows the road up the narrow defile, leaving the broad plain behind him, so do the birds change their direction at this point, and prepare to leave food and comfort until they are on the southern side of the barrier. All day long a little tract of broken ground lying between the hotel and the river had been alive with Pipits ; but when we walked further up the main valley west- wards not a bird was to be seen, except here and there a lingering Redstart. The desolation was complete ; yet no sooner had we returned to Hos- penthal, than we were greeted again by Pipits, Wagtails, Martins, and even by a solitary Wheat- ear, who seemed left behind by his relations. This was the only bird of its kind which I saw Return to Meiringen. 205 during my stay in the Alps. The Wheatears are, as in England, the first migrants which arrive in the spring, and doubtless they are also among the first to depart. The only other bird which was common here at this time was the Kestrel the Thurmfalk (tower-falcon) as he is here called ; they nest in the Alps in old towers or rocks, and several were always to be seen about the old Lombard tower which overlooks the village, and once overawed its inhabitants. The next day I resolved to try whether the Grimsel Pass, the second principal opening from the north through the great barrier, would show us anything new ; but in this project I was dis- appointed, for rain and intense cold came on, which drove me down to Meiringen and deprived me of any opportunity of further observation. And here, as I write, the sun has once more broken through the clouds, a bracing north wind blows, the mountains above us are covered with fresh snow, the trees are beginning to lose their summer green, the cow-bells are ringing in the valley instead of upon the alps, and alpine autumn is here in all its health and beauty. The hotel is 206 The Alps in September. empty, and my only companions are the faithful Anderegg and my host, Herr Willi, now Cabinet Minister of his Canton, who entertains me with discourse of the history of the Haslithal, the antiquities of which he has been the first to explore. Some summer birds are still here ; the Chiffchaff for a single moment uttered its voice outside the window by which I write. The Robins are in fair abundance, and a few will stay in the valley, where the cold is not greater than in our own climate, throughout the winter. A walk this morning showed us the House-martin, the Crag-martin, and a single individual of the numerous Alpine Swifts, which in the summer haunt the gigantic precipices that frown upon the valley. We have seen how the Swallow-tribe departs from the Alps, and have also learnt something of the movements and migration of other birds ; but I have still to discover in which direction the tenderer birds, the various members of the tribe of warblers, find a way to their southern winter home. I can hardly believe that they can traverse the wild and shelterless mountain passes with their Migration of Warblers. 207 short wings and fragile bodies ; yet in the long sea voyages which they make they are no less at the mercy of the elements than they would be when in the jaws of the most savage defile of the St. Gotthard. While I have been fortunate in seeing so much in the course of a very few days, it is obvious that much remains to be discovered, and that future visits to Switzerland, whether in spring or autumn, may not be without their reward ; for I have little doubt that there is no European region where the peculiar conditions of temperature, and the extra- ordinary variety of food, are so likely to produce abnormal effects on the living population effects which as yet are perhaps comparatively little understood. I feel that my hastily collected in- formation is but a single item in the vast repertory of material which stands ready to the hand of any one whose fortune may send him here at the right time, and with the requisite qualifications. Many Englishmen now pass the Alps in spring by way of the St. Gotthard railway on their return from Italy and the Riviera ; if among these there be 208 The Alps in September. any that are curious about birds, let them halt for a day or two on each side of the pass, and learn what they can of the arrival of migrants from the south. And let me add, that any occupation which brings a foreigner into close contact with the more intelligent Swiss, especially at a time when they are not hard driven by the touring world of all nations, will give new life and interest to even the shortest visit to a country whose history and in- stitutions are as wonderful as its scenery, or as its animal and vegetable life. We are apt to think of the Swiss as a self-seeking people, whose only object is to make capital out of the natural beauties of the extraordinary land they live in. But this is not a happy impeachment in the mouth of Englishmen, who know so well how to make the best of their own resources, and who have con- tributed not a little to stimulate the ardour of the Swiss for gain and speculation. He who would really know the peasant of the Alps must see him in his natural state, struggling hard against adversity, heavily taxed for education and im- provements, loving labour and doing it cheerfully ; 77/6^ Peasant of the Alps. 209 a human being wrestling hard with Nature, who yields her wealth for him with a very sparing hand, while she lavishes upon the birds that live around him untold abundance and endless resource. JOHANN ANUEREGG. CHAPTER VII. THE BIRDS OF VIRGIL. IT might naturally be supposed, that an Oxford tutor, who finds his vocation in the classics and his amusement in the birds, would be in the way of noticing what ancient authors have to say about their feathered friends and enemies. One Christmas vacation, when there was compara- tively little to observe out-of-doors, I made a tour through the poems of Virgil, keeping a sharp look-out for all mention of birds, and compiled a complete collection of his ornithological passages. I chose a Latin poet because in Latin it happens to be easier to identify a genus or species than it is in Greek ; and I chose Virgil partly because the ability to read and understand him is to me one of the things which make life most worth living, and partly because I know that there is no Virgil's Early Life. 211 other Latin poet who felt in the same degree the beauty and the mystery of animals. I believe there are still people who think of Virgil as a court-poet, writing to order, and drawing conventional ideas of nature from Greek authors of an earlier age. This is, of course, absolutely untrue. Virgil's connection with Au- gustus was accidental, and was probably no more to the poet's taste than any other result of an education and an occasional residence in the huge O city of Rome. If we compare what is known of his life with the general character of his poetry, we get a very different result. The first sixteen years of his life were spent in his native country of Cisalpine Gaul, almost under the shadow of the Alps, three hundred miles away from Rome. His parents were ' rustic,' and he himself was brought up among the woods and rushy meads of Mantua and Cremona. " Doubt- less there is many a reminiscence of his early years in the Georgics, where his love of the woods, in which he must have wandered as a boy, meets us in every page." * In that day it is 3 Ancient Lives of Virgil (Prof. Nettleship), p. 33. P 2 212 The Birds of Virgil. probable enough that the great plain of the Po was still largely occupied by those dense forests, the destruction of which is said to be the chief cause of the floods to which the river is liable. Much land must also have been still undrained and marshy : and we can still trace in the neigh- bourhood of Mantua the remains of those ancient lake-dwellings which an ancient people had built there long before the Gauls, from whom our poet was perhaps descended, had taken possession of the plain. These woods and marshes, as well as the land which Roman settlers had tilled for vine or olive, must have been alive with birds in Virgil's day. There would be all the birds of the woods, the pigeons and their enemies the owls and hawks ; there would be cranes and storks in their yearly migrations, and all manner of water- fowl from the two rivers Po and Mincio, and from the Lacus Benacus (Lago di Garda) which is only about twenty miles distant It would be strange indeed, if, even when following the tracks of a Greek poet, Virgil had not in his mind some of the familiar sights on the banks of Mincius. VirgiTs Italian Homes. 2 1 3 But later in life he was at least as much in Southern as in Northern Italy. That the first three Georgics were written, or at least thought out, on the lovely bay of Naples, is certain from the lines at the end of the fourth Georgic : Illo Virgilium me tempore dulcis alebat Parthenope, studiis florentem ignobilis oti. 1 Here were all the sea-birds, and the wild-fowl that haunt the sea ; here, as we shall see, the summer visitors might land on their way from Africa. Here, from the sea and all its varying life, the poet's mind would enrich itself with sights unknown to him in the flat-lands of the Padus, and grow to understand more fully day by day the impressions often dull ones which Nature had made on the poets who had sung before him. Rome he never loved, though he had a house there : perhaps he had seen enough of the huge city during the years given to the dreary rhetorical education of the day, after first leaving his home. 1 I Virgil then, of sweet Parthenope The nursling, woo'd the flowery walks of peace Inglorious, c. 2 1 4 The Birds of VirgiL He loved Campania, and he loved Sicily 1 ; at Tarentum also he is found, probably visiting the friendly and jovial Horace. The hill-country of the peninsula, and of the island that belongs, to it, became a part of his poetical soul ; and as he probably spent much of his time at his own Cisalpine farm, after he was restored to it by his patron's kindly influence, he must have been constantly moving among all the phases of Italian landscape in the plain, on the hills, by the sea. Everything, then, in Virgil's history, shows him a genuine poet of the country, and at the same time no one who really knows his poems can deny that they fully bear out the evidence of his life. It is true that he drew very largely on other poets, and could not "disengage himself from the antecedents of his art." From Homer, Hesiod, Aratus, or Theocritus, for example, come nearly all the passages in his works in which birds are mentioned. But though they descend from these poets, and bear the features of their ancestors, 1 " Habuit domum Romae Esquili's juxta hortos Maecena- tianos, quamquam secessu Campaniae Siciliaeque plurimum uteretur." (Life by Suetonius, ch. 13.) Delusions of Virgil 's Time. 215 they are yet a new and living generation, not lifeless copies modelled by a mere imitator ; and their beauty and their truth is not that of Greek, but of Italian poetry. Let any one compare the translations of Aratus by other Roman hands, by Cicero, Festus, and Germanicus, with Virgil's first Georgic, and he will not fail to mark the differ- ence between the mere translator and the poet who breathes into the work of his predecessors a new life and an immortal one. There is hardly to be found, in the whole of Virgil's poems, a single allusion to the habits of birds or any other animals which is untrue to fact as we know it from Italian naturalists. Here and there, of course, there are delusions which were the com- mon property of the age. If, for example, he tells us in the fourth Georgic that bees oft weigh up tiny stones As light craft ballast in the tossing tide, Wherewith they poise them through the cloudy vast : let us remember that the true history of bees has been matter of quite recent discovery. And we may note at the same time that Pliny, a professed naturalist, living at least a generation after Virgil, 216 The Birds of Virgil. has actually asserted that cranes, when flying against the wind, w r ill take up stones with their feet, and stuff their long throats full of gravel, which they discharge when they alight safely on the ground ! l Virgil mentions about twenty kinds of birds, most of them several times. These twenty kinds do not correspond so much to our species as to our genera ; for the Greeks and Romans, I need hardly say, had only very rough-and-ready methods of classification, just as is the case with uneducated people at the present day. When they found birds tolerably like each other, they readily put them down as of the same kind, rarely marking minor differences. Thus corvus appears to stand for both crow and rook ; picus stands for all the woodpeckers inhabiting Italy ; by accipiter may be understood any kind of hawk. But in spite of this difficulty, it is sometimes possible to make out the particular species which is alluded to, partly by getting information as to those which 1 Plin., N. H. x. 60. Aristotle refutes the fable, which is alluded to by Aristophanes in the Birds (1137)- See Arist. H, JV. viii. 14. 5. Virgil s Bird-Knowledge. 217 are found in Italy at the present day, partly by comparing Virgil with Pliny and other Roman writers, and where Virgil is using a Greek original, by trying to discover, chiefly through Aristotle's admirable book on natural history, what bird is indicated by the Greek word translated, and whether that bird is an Italian bird as well as Greek, and therefore likely to be known to Virgil at first hand. I am not going to trouble my readers with much of the uninteresting detail of an inquiry like this (in which indeed the game might seem to be hardly worth the candle), but merely to give them some idea of the bird-knowledge on which this greatest of Roman poets drew, whether at first or second-hand, for description or illustration ; and in so doing to make clear to them, so far as I can, the particular kinds of birds which he had in his mind. I shall quote him in the original, but shall add translations in footnotes : in the Georgics, his poem of husbandry, I take advantage of a poet's translation, that of my friend Mr. James Rhoades, which cannot easily be outdone either in exactness of scholarship or in beauty of diction ; 218 The Birds of VirgiL and in the Aeneid I make use of Mr. Mackail's prose translation, which I prefer on the whole to any poetical version I know. One passage from the Eclogues I have translated myself. The first birds we find mentioned in the poems are the Pigeons, and we may as well begin with them as with any other. Meliboeus tells Tityrus that the farm to which he is returned after a long exile the same farm which the poet himself lost and found again shall yield him much true com- fort and delight, even though he find it overgrown with reeds, and spoilt with the stones and mud of overflowing Mincius : Ncc tamen interea raucae, tua cura, palumbes, Nee gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo. 1 Here two distinct species are clearly meant by the words palumbes and turtur. About the latter of these there is no difficulty ; from all that is tolcl us of it we gather that it is the same bird which the French still call tourterelle and the Italians fort ore I la, and which we know as the Turtle- 1 And all the while, with hollow voice, thine own Loved wood-pigeon shall soothe thee, nor alone, For from the lofty elm the dove shall ever moan. of Ancient Italy. 219 dove ; it is still found in small numbers passing the summer and breeding in Italy, and is most frequent in the sub-alpine region of which Virgil is here writing. But what bird is here meant by pahimbes ? Both this word and its near relative columba must be translated by pigeon, but can we distinguish them as different species ? Here the commentaries and dictionaries give us no sub- stantial help, and I may be pardoned for pausing a moment to consider a question of some interest to historical ornithologists. There are at the present day three kinds of pigeons beside the turtle-dove just mentioned, which are found in Italy ; they are the same three which we know in England as the Wood-pigeon or Ring-dove, the Stock-dove, and the Rock-dove or Blue-rock. Of these the last, which with us is the rarest, only found on certain parts of our coast, is by far the most abundant in Italy, and is the only one which habitually breeds there. The other two species pass over Italy in spring and autumn regularly, but seldom or never stay there ; they go northwards in the spring from Africa and the East, and return again in the autumn after 220 77ie Birds of Virgil. breeding in cooler climes. But it is fairly certain that in ancient times two species of pigeons bred in Italy : (i) the bird meant by palumbes, of which Virgil makes the shepherd Damoetas say in the third Eclogue that he has " marked the place where they have gathered materials for nesting," ' and of which Pliny tells his readers that when they see this bird upon her nest they may know that midsummer is past (Pliny, Nat. Hist, xviii. 267) ; (2) the bird named columba, which word, though etymologically the same as palumbes, is used by Pliny, and also by the Roman agricultural writers, to represent a bird which is certainly to be distinguished from palumbes* The columba was in fact the tame pigeon of the Romans : it was also their carrier-pigeon ; for in the siege of Mutina, B.C. 43, the besieged general communi- cated with the relieving force by means oicolumbae, to the feet of which letters were attached (Plin. x. no). The words may here and there be used loosely, and it is possible that attempts may have been made to domesticate the palumbes as well as 1 Eclogue iii. 68. 2 Columella viii. 8. Cato de Re Rustica, 90. Columba and Palumbes. 221 the columba ; but in the vast majority of passages the columba is certainly either the domestic bird or a wild bird of the same species, while palumbes is some other kind of pigeon. Even in Virgil the distinction is maintained ; for while palumbes breeds in the elm in the first Eclogue, already quoted (which poem, it should be noted, is genuinely north- Italian, and inde- pendent of a Greek original), columba on the other hand has her nest in a rock, as the follow- ing well-known and beautiful passage will plainly show Quails spelunca subito commota columba, Cui domus et dulces latebroso in pumice nidi, Fertur in arva volans, plausumque extcrrita pennis Dat tecto ingentem, mox acre lapsa quieto Radit iter liquidum, celeres neque commovet alas. And in the same fifth Aeneid, the bird which served as a target in the archery contest a domestic bird, we may suppose was a cohmiba, not a palumbes. Now it is a fact almost universally recognized by modern ornithologists that our domestic pigeon is in all its varieties descended from the wild Rock-dove ; and thus when we find that the 222 The Birds of Virgil. Romans used columba to denote their domestic bird, and also a wild bird which made its nest in rocks, the conclusion is almost certain that by that word we are to understand our Blue-rock pigeon (Columba livia) ; and if this is so, by palumbes must be meant one of the other two Italian pigeons, the Wood-pigeon (Columba palumbus, Linn.) or the Stock-dove (Columba aenas, Linn.). Both species, as I have said, are now birds of passage in Italy, while the Blue-rock is resident ; and Pliny tells us of the palumbes that it arrived every year in great numbers from the sea he does not say at what season. Perhaps the Stock- dove * is the more likely of the two to have been the bird generally meant by palumbes ; but it is quite possible that, like the unskilled of the present day, the Romans confounded the two species, and wrote of them as one. But there is still a difficulty. The palumbes in the time of Virgil and Pliny seems to have bred in Italy ; Pliny knew all about their breeding (x. 147 and 153), and Virgil makes Damoetas mark 1 Philemon Holland so translates palumbes in his version of Pliny. Passion of Italians for Birds. 223 the place where their nesting is going on. But it is now very rarely, if we may trust Italian naturalists, that either Ring-dove or Stock-dove passes a summer in Italy. Birds seek a cool climate for their breeding-places ; probably be- cause in very hot countries the food suitable to their nestlings will not be found in the breeding- season. Has the climate of Italy become hotter in the last two thousand years, discouraging these birds from lingering south of the Alps ? This is an old question which has been well thrashed out by the learned, and the general con- clusion seems to be in the affirmative. The last eminent writer on the subject takes this view, 1 and his argument would receive a decided clinch if it could be proved that certain kinds of birds, which formerly bred in the country, do so no longer, and that this is not due to other causes, such as the well-known passion of the Italians for killing and eating all the birds on which they can lay their hands. If we now turn to the first Georgic, in which, following the Greek poet Aratus with freedom 1 Nissen, Italische Landeskunde, p. 374. 224 The Birds of Virgil. and discretion, Virgil has told us more of animal life than in all the rest of his poems, we find frequent mention of the long-legged and long- billed birds with which he must have been very familiar in his boyhood at Mantua. The first of these we meet with is the Crane (Latin grus]. About the meaning of the word grus there can be no doubt ; it would seem that the Crane was a bird accurately distinguished by the forefathers of our modern Aryan peoples even before they separated from each other. The Greek word yepavog, the Latin grus, the German Kranick, and the Welsh garan are all identical, and point to a period when the bird was known by the same nam to the whole race. Probably it was much more abundant both in Europe and Asia, at a time when the face of the country was covered by vast tracts of swamp and forest. Even now, at the period of migration, they swarm in the East ; " the whooping and trumpeting of the crane," says a great authority (Canon Tristram), " rings through the night air in spring, and the vast flocks we noticed passing north near Beersheba were a wonderful sight." The Crane. 225 Virgil mentions the Crane in two passages as doing damage to the crops : and this is fully borne out by modern accounts from Asia Minor and Scinde, quoted by Mr. Dresser in his Birds of Europe. The poet says of them (Georgic i. 1 18) Nee tamen haec cum sint hominumque bourn que labores Versando terram expert!, nihil improbus anser Strymoniaeque grues et amaris intuba fibris Officiunt aut umbra nocet. 1 And in line 307 of the same book he tells the husbandman that the winter is the time to catch them : Turn gruibus pedicas, et retia ponere cervis Auritosque sequi lepores ; 2 a passage from which it might appear as if the Crane were snared as an article of food, not only as an enemy to the agriculturist. And indeed in Pliny's time the epicure's taste was all in favour 1 But no whit the more For all expedients tried and travail borne By man and least in turning oft the soil, Do greedy goose and Strymon-haunting cranes And succory's bitter fibres not molest Or shade not injure - Time it is to set Snares for the crane, and meshes for the stag, And hunt the long-eared hares. Q 226 77*? Birds of Virgil. of cranes against storks ; but when Virgil wrote, the reverse was the case. This little fact, so characteristic of the sway of fashion over the gourmand of that luxurious age, was recorded by Cornelius Nepos, and is quoted from him by Pliny (Nat. Hist. x. 60). The Crane is now a bird of passage in Italy, and the Stork also ; they appear in spring on their way to northern breeding-places, and in autumn reappear with their numbers reinforced by the young broods of the year. These habits seem to have been the same in Virgil's day. In the passage just quoted (Georgic i. 120) it is evidently in the spring that the bird was hurtful to the crops, as the seed was to be sown in the spring (line 43, etc.). On the other hand, in line 307, the Crane is to be snared in the winter ; yet I can hardly believe that any number could have stayed in Italy during winter, if the climate was then colder than it is now. Moreover, Pliny speaks of the Crane as ' aestatis advena,' that is, a summer visitor, as opposed to the Stork, who was a winter visitor. But these Latin words ' aestas ' and ' hiems ' are Migration of Cranes. 227 to be understood loosely for the whole warm season, and the whole cold or stormy season ; and if cranes came on their passage northwards, when warm weather began, they must also have ap- peared, on their return journey, when cold weather was beginning ; so that both crane and stork might equally be styled ' aestatis advena,' or ' hiemis ad vena.' Pliny was surely making one of his many blunders when he distinguished the two birds by these two expressions. The migration of such great birds as these, unlike those of our tiny visitors to England, could hardly escape the notice even of men who knew nothing of scientific observation. Virgil has given us a momentary glimpse of the Crane's migration in spring ; he is following in the tracks of Homer, but as a Mantuan he must have seen the phe- nomenon himself also. Clamorem ad sidera tollunt Dardanidae e muris ; spes addita suscitat iras ; Tela manu jaciunt; quales sub nubibus atris Strymoniae dant signa grues, atque aethera tranant Cum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo. 1 1 The Dardanians on the walls raise a shout to the sky. Hope comes to kindle wrath j they hurl their missiles strongly ; Q 2 228 The Birds of Virgil. Here, as they fly before a southern wind, they are on their way to the north in the spring. But in another passage he seems rather to be thinking of autumn ; it is where he is telling the husbandman how to presage an approaching storm, such a storm as descends in autumn from the Alps upon the plains of Lombardy : Nunquam imprudentibus imber Obfuit ; aut ilium surgentem vallibus imis Aeriae fugere grues, aut bucula coelum Suspiciens patulis captavit naribus auras, Aut arguta lacus circumvolitavit hirundo. 1 The general tenor of the whole passage of which these lines are a fragment, as well as their original in the Diosemeia of Aratus, points to the approach of ' hiems,' the stormy season, as the event in- dicated ; the falling leaves dance in air, the feathers even as under black clouds cranes from the Strymon utter their signal notes and sail clamouring across the sky, and noisily stream down the gale. Aen. x. 262 foil. 1 Never at unawares did showers annoy : Or, as it rises, the high-soaring cranes Flee to the hills before it, or, with face Upturned to heaven, the heifer snuffs the gale Through gaping nostrils, or about the meres Shrill-twittering flits the swallow. Gcorgic i. 373. 77ie Stork. 229 of the moulting birds float on the water, but the swallow is not yet gone. The deep Alpine valleys seethe with swirling mist, which rises into gathering cloud, and soon becomes stormy rain beating upon the plains, as we may see it in any ' Loamshire ' of our own, that lies below the stony hills of a wilder and wetter country-side. In this striking and truthful passage, Virgil has not followed his model too closely, but was evidently thinking of what he must often have witnessed himself. The Stork is only mentioned by Virgil in a single passage Cum vere rubenti Candida venit avis longis invisa colubris. 1 Doubtless the bird arrived in great numbers in spring on the Mantuan marshes, and found abundance of food there in the way of frogs and snakes. Its snake-eating propensity was con- sidered so valuable in Thessaly, that the bird was preserved there by law, says Aristotle. 2 But did it remain to breed in Italy ? It is remarkable 1 In blushing spring Comes the white bird long-bodied snakes abhor. Georg. ii. 320. - Mirabiiia 23. 230 The Birds of Virgil. that both Aristotle and Pliny have very little to say of its habits, and hardly anything as to its breeding ; and if the Stork had been a bird familiar to them, they could hardly have failed to give it a prominent place in their books. At the present time it seems to pass over Italy and Greece on its passage northwards, never staying to breed in the former country and rarely in the latter ; yet this can hardly be owing to temper- ature, as it breeds freely in the parallel latitudes of Spain and Asia Minor. As regards ancient Italy, however, the question seems to be set at rest by a very curious passage from the Satyricon of Petronius, which has been kindly pointed out to me by Mr. Robinson Ellis. It is remarkable not only for its Latin, but for its concise and admirable description of the charac- teristic ways of the Stork : Ciconia etiam grata, peregrina, hospita, Pietaticultrix, gracilipes, crotalistria, Avis exsul hiemis, titulus tepidi temporis, Nequitiae nidum in cacabo fecit meo. 1 1 See Petronius, Satyr. 55. Cp. alsoy//z'. Sat. i, line 1 16, and Mayor's note. In the London Zoological Gardens, in March The Stork. 231 " A Stork too, that welcome guest from foreign lands, that devotee of filial duty, with its long thin legs and rattling bill, the bird that is banished by the winter and announces the coming of the warm season, has made his accursed nest in my boiler." I am reminded also of a story, which has the authority both of Jornandes and Pro- copius, that at the siege of Aquileia in A.D. 452, Attila was encouraged to persist by the sight of a Stork and her young leaving the beleaguered city. " Such a domestic bird would never have abandoned her ancient seats unless those towers had been devoted to impending ruin and soli- tude." 1 Here then we seem to have another example of a bird abandoning its ancient practice of breeding, occasionally at least, in Italy. If this is due to persecution, the persecutors have made a great mistake. The Stork does no harm to man, but rather rids his fields of vermin ; the Crane, which belongs to a different order of birds, may do serious damage, as we have seen, to 1889, a pair of Storks were illustrating Petronitis' lines admir- ably except in that they were captives. 1 Gibbon, vol. iv. p. 240, ed. Milnian, 232 The Birds of Virgil. cultivated land, like the ' improbus anser,' and other birds which Virgil in the first Georgic in- structs the husbandman to catch with lime or net, or to frighten away from the fields. 1 Let us now turn to the -big black birds of the race of the Crows, which are always so difficult to distinguish from one another: for the Roman savant not less difficult than for our own un- learned. There are to be found in Italy at the present day the Raven, the Crow, the Rook, the Jackdaw, the Chough, and the Alpine Chough ; all of these seem to be fairly common and resident in one or other part of the country, except our familiar friends the Crow and the Rook, the former of which is very rare, and the latter hardly more than a bird of passage. We cannot of course expect to find these accurately distin- guished by the ancient Italians ; and there is in fact still some uncertainty as to the identification of certain birds of this kind mentioned by Virgil. The two commonest of these are the corvus and the cornix words which undoubtedly represent two different species. The Roman augurs, who 1 Georg. \. 1 20, 139, 156, 271. Corvus and Comix. 233 were always busily engaged in observing birds (and it were to be wished that they had observed them to some better purpose), clearly distinguished corvtts and comix. 1 So also did Pliny, 2 in the following curious passage : " The coruiis lays its eggs before midsummer, and is then in bad con- dition for sixty days, up to the ripening of the figs in autumn : but the comix begins to be dis- ordered after that time." Virgil also uses the words for two distinct species ; his comix is solitary Turn cornix plena pluviam vocat improba voce Et sola in sicca secum spatiatur arena ; 3 while corvns is gregarious, as is shown in the following memorable description of Nature and of the birds taking heart after the storm has passed : Turn liquidas corvi presso ter gutture voces Aut quater ingeminant, et saepe cubilibus altis, Nescio qua praeter solitum dulcedine laeti, 1 Cic. de Div. i. 29. 2 N. 21. x. 32. 3 Then the crow With full voice, good-for-nought, inviting rain, Stalks on the dry sand mateless and alone, Georg. \. 388. 234 The Birds of Virgil. Inter se in foliis strepitant ; juvat imbribus actis, Progeniem parvam dulcesque revisere natos. 1 That in these last beautiful lines corvus means a Rook, no Englishman is likely to deny ; yet there are two difficulties to be put aside before we can make the assertion with entire confidence. The first is, that Virgil, here following Aratus, trans- lated by corvus the Greek word xopo, which is not generally accepted as meaning a Rook. This is the word which the Greek historian Polybius uses for those naval machines invented by the Romans, in the first war with Carthage, for grappling with a hooked projecting beak the galleys of the enemy ; and the rook's bill is hardly so well suited to give a name to such an engine as that of the crow or raven, 2 which has the tip of the upper mandible sharply bent down- 1 Soft then the voice of rooks from indrawn throat Thrice, four times, o'er repeated, and full oft On their high cradles, by some hidden joy Gladdened beyond their wont, in bustling throngs Among the leaves they riot ; so sweet it is When showers are spent, their own loved nests again And tender brood to visit. Georg. i. 410. 2 Sundevall (Thierarten des Aristoteles, p. 123) pronounces t;6a to have been our Raven. Corvus and Comix. 235 wards, like that of most flesh-eating birds. Still I must hold it probable that Aratus here used the word for the rook, as he makes it gregarious, and so, I think, did the Alexandrian scholar Theon, who wrote a commentary on his poem. The only other possibility is that he was thinking of the Alpine Chough, a bird which he might possibly have known, and one of thoroughly social habits. But that Virgil, though he too probably knew this bird, was not thinking of it when he wrote the lines just quoted, I feel tolerably sure ; he would most likely have used the word graculns rather than corvus, which would seem never to have been applied, like monedula and graculns, to the smaller birds of the group, such as the Alpine Chough and the Jackdaw. The second difficulty lies in the fact that the Rook is now only a bird of passage in Italy, never stopping to breed in the southern part of the peninsula, and very rarely in the northern ; while Virgil speaks of the corvi in the last-quoted passage as loving to revisit their nests. But this difficulty has been overcome by the delightful discovery that the Rooks still stay and breed in 236 The Birds of Virgil. the sub-alpine neighbourhood where Virgil passed his early life. 1 As I have remarked about the pigeons and the stork, the climate may have been such as would induce some birds to stop south of the great Alpine barrier, which now find there no climate cool enough for breeding ; and the Rook was perhaps a more regular resident and breeder then than he is now. We may conclude then that Virgil's connts is our old friend the Rook, even if some Latin authors use the word equally for Rook, Crow, and Raven. Pliny for example tells us (N. H. x. 124) that the corvus can be taught to speak (fancy a bird talking Latin, that stiff and solemn speech!), that he eats flesh for the most part, and that he sometimes makes his nest in elevated buildings ; feats which we are not used to associate with Rooks. In fact it is plain that Pliny, who w r as more of a learned book-reader than a careful observer of the minutiae of nature, was not quite clear in his notions about the big black birds. But if we can be pretty sure about corvus, what is Virgil's comix, stalking on the shore in solitary 1 See Newton's Yarrell, ii. 290. Corvus and Cornix. 237 state, and uttering admonitory croaks from the hollow holm-oak ? If we consult dictionaries we shall learn that comix is the Crow or Rook, "a smaller bird than corvus" Where did the diction- aries get this authority for making confusion worse confounded ? If Virgil distinguished corvus and comix, and if corvus is the rook, then cornix must be the crow or the raven, and in fact the word probably stands for both. I should incline on the whole to the raven, seeing that at the present day it is much the commoner bird of the two in Italy. Alpine choughs and jackdaws are not wont to stalk about alone ; and though the larger chough (our Cornish chough) might do so, and is to be found in the mountain districts of Italy, he cannot well be the bird generally under- stood by cornix. Could a chough learn to talk with his long thin red bill ? But Pliny knew of a talking cornix ; " while I was engaged upon this book," he says, " there was in Rome a cornix from the south-west of Spain, belonging to a Roman knight, which was of an amazingly pure black, and could say certain strings of words, to which it frequently added new ones." 238 The Birds of Virgil. Swans are frequently mentioned by Virgil,, as by other Latin and Greek poets. This splendid bird must have been much commoner then throughout Europe than it is now, and accord- ingly attracted much attention. It doubtless abounded in the swampy localities of the north of Italy, and at the mouths of the great rivers of Thrace and Asia Minor, as well as in the north of Europe, where it came to be woven into many a Teutonic fable. Homer has frequent and beautiful allusions to it ; and the town of Clazomenae, at the mouth of the river Hermus, has a swan stamped upon its coins. This Swan of the old poets is without any doubt the whooper (Cycnus musiciis), whose voice and presence are still well known in Italy and Greece. Virgil had seen it at Mantua, on the watery plain of the Mincius : Pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos. 1 And in an admirable simile in the eleventh book of the Aeneid, he likens the. stir and dissension in 1 Whose weedy water feeds the snow-white swan. Georg. ii. 199. Siuans. 239 the camp of Turnus, when the news suddenly arrives that Aeneas is marching upon them, to the loud calls of this bird : Hie undique clamor Dissensti vario magnus se tollit ad auras : Haud secus atque alto in luco cum forte catervae Consedere aviurn, piscosove amne Padusae Dant sonitum rauci per stagna loquacia cycni. 1 We now come to two birds mentioned in the same line of the third Georgic. The poet is telling the farmer to water his flocks in the cool evening of a hot day : Cum frigidus aera vesper Temperat, et saltus reficit jam roscida lima, Litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi. 2 The first of these birds is also mentioned in a line of the first Georgic, which is mainly taken from Aratus ; but it is significant that Aratus does not mention the ' alcyon ' either here or anywhere else. 1 With that a great noise rises aloft in diverse contention, even as when flocks of birds haply settle on a lofty grove, and swans utter their hoarse cry among the vocal pools in the fish- filled river of Padusa. -Aen. xi. 456; cp. vii. 700. 2 When cool eve Allays the air, and dewy moonbeams slake The forest glades, with halcyon's voice the shore And every thicket with the goldfinch rings. Georg. iii. 338. 240 The Birds of Virgil. Non tepidum ad solem pennas in littore pandunt Dilectae Thetidi alcyones. 1 That the ' alcyon ' of these two passages is to be identified with our Kingfisher, which is still an Italian bird, and the only one of its kind, I can have no reasonable doubt ; for Pliny's description of the bird is too exact to be mistaken. "It is," he says, " a little larger than a sparrow, of a blue- green colour (colore cyaneo), red in the under parts, having some white feathers close to its neck, and a long thin bill." This description, it is true, is copied almost word for word from Aris- totle, the only exception being the allusion to the white feathers on the side of the neck, which are a well-known feature in the Kingfisher." Whether both were thinking of the same bird it is im- possible to decide ; but that Pliny was describing 1 Not to the Sun's warmth there upon the shore Do halcyons dear to Thetis ope their wings. Georg. i. 398. ' 2 This exception is singular, as Pliny seems to depend on Aristotle for everything else which he tells about the bird. I am inclined to think that in this case Pliny must have supple- mented his master's account from his own observation. He had a villa on the bay of Naples, which bay was probably the ' littus ' referred to by Virgil ; and both may here have seen the bird on the shore. Alcyon and Acalanthis. 24.1 our Kingfisher, and believed Aristotle to have clone so in the passage he copied, it is almost unreasonable to doubt. It is, however, an open question whether the bird ordinarily known to the Greeks as aAxunjv is to be identified with the Kingfisher. The greatest living authority on the birds of the Levant, Canon Tristram of Durham, tells me that he has con- vinced himself that it is not the Kingfisher, but the Tern or Sea-swallow : a rare coin of Eretria led him to this conclusion, on which a Tern is figured, sitting on the back of a cow. 1 And it must be allowed that the Greeks seem to have thought of their aXxutov as a sea bird no less than as a river bird. Aristotle remarks that it goes up rivers, but he seems to have thought of it mainly as a sea bird, and a well-known passage in the seventh Idyll of Theocritus appears to bear him out. But I am not here specially concerned with Greek ornithology, and what Virgil says of 1 I have seen a photograph of this coin, and satisfied myself that the bird was meant for a Tern. But I have so far been unable to discover any connection between Eretria and the (\\KVWI-. Sundevall is confident that Aristotle's bird is the Kingfisher. K 242 The Birds of Virgil. the alcyon piping and pluming himself on the shore is perfectly consistent with the habits of the bird. I have myself seen it on the coast of Dorset, "pennas in littore pandens," and taking flight over a bay full half a mile in width. A greater difficulty lies in the alleged vocal powers of the bird ; they sing, Pliny tells us, in the reeds, and Virgil's alcyon makes the shore echo with his voice. The Kingfisher, so far as I know, is a silent bird except when disturbed ; he will then utter a shrill pipe as he flies away. But I am quite at a loss to explain his singing, except by supposing that this was one of several curious delusions that had gathered round a curious bird. 1 The other bird mentioned in the lines last quoted is, and perhaps will remain, a puzzle. Mr. Rhoades makes it the Goldfinch, following the commentators, who themselves follow an old tradition W 7 hich will not bear criticism, and in favour of which I can find nothing more con- 1 E. g. Aristotle gives, and Pliny copies from him, an extra- ordinary account of the nest and eggs. N. H. ix. 14. See Note C, at end of volume. The Goldfinch. 243 vincing than the argument that acantha } means in Greek a thorny or prickly tree, while the Gold- finch's favourite food is the seed of the thistle. Let us notice, however, first, that it is not the way of the Goldfinch to sit in a thicket and sing, as Virgil describes the Acalanthis ; it is a restless, lively, aerial bird, fond of singing on the wing, and by no means disposed to lurk under cover ; and secondly, that the word axavQa does not necessarily mean a thistle, but is equally applied to all kinds of thorny trees and shrubs,' 2 such as the dwni in which Virgil makes the voice of the bird resound. Where did Virgil get this Greek word acanthii' or acalanthis, which he thus appropriated to ex- press some bird familiar to himself? Probably from a very beautiful passage in Theocritus' seventh Idyll, where, lying on the vine-leaves, 1 For the connection between uKarOa. and uKaXarQiQ see Conington's note on Georg. iii. 338. 2 Theophrastus, for example, applies it to the Egyptian mimosa, the thorns of which lately proved so damaging to our troops in the Soudan. (I,cn/, Botanik der Griechen, P- 735-) 3 There is another reading, 'et acanthida.' R 2 244 The Birds of Virgil. Damoetas and Daphnis hear the birds singing, and the murmur of the bees : "Aeifiov KopvSol Kal jrav8t3eCi eareve Tpvyuiv, "the larks and the acanthides were singing, and the turtle-dove was moaning." But what kind of bird was Theocritus himself thinking of? Here we must have recourse to Aristotle, who in his book on birds describes the bird known to the Greeks as acanthis as being "of poor colouring and habits, but having a clear shrill voice." 1 This cannot possibly be the Goldfinch, the happiest and most brightly coloured of our smaller English birds ; one too whose song would hardly be picked out to be described as Tuyupa, which word denotes a sustained high and shrill sound, and would not well express a twitter or a quiet warble. Sun- devall, the Swedish scholar-naturalist, has pro- nounced this acanthis of Aristotle to be the linnet ; a conclusion with which no one would be likely to agree who is fresh from a sight of that lively bird in its splendid summer plumage, or who knows its gentle twittering song. Let us remember that 1 Kavo/7ioi Kal k'cu'dv^oot, ^tw^i/)' ^e'rrot XtyupoV lyovmv, Hist. Aniin. ix. 17. Warblers in Italy and Greece. 245 Aristotle is of all naturalists, down to the time of Willoughby and Ray, the most exact and trust- worthy, and that when he uses an adjective to describe a bird or its voice, he means something exact and definite, and is not talking loosely. Before we try to come to a conclusion about the axavbig, let us note that Aristotle mentions another small bird, the axavduXTuV, which, from the name, we may guess to have been one of the same kind as the acanthis. This bird builds a nest which is round and made of flax, and has a small hole by way of entrance. Now let us observe that Italy and Greece are swarming for the greater part of the year with a variety of those small brown or dusky-coloured birds which naturalists roughly call ' warblers ' birds for the most part apt to creep and lurk about in thickets or small trees, and having voices more or less shrill, which may very well indeed be called X/yupa/. In England we have some species of this order which are abundant in the summer ; e.g. in Oxford, the chiffchaflf, willow-wren, sedge- warbler, and reed-warbler the two former of which build spherical nests on the ground with 246 The Birds of Virgil. a small entrance-hole. These birds correspond with both of Aristotle's birds in being xaxej3*oj z. e. leading a poor lurking life ; xaxo%pooi, as being all very sober-coloured and difficult to distinguish from one another, even by a modern expert ; in having a clear, sustained, or sibilant song, 1 and lastly in building some of them, that is round nests with small holes for ingress and egress. Now in Italy and Greece the number of species of these little birds is much larger than in Eng- land, and it is hardly possible that they could have escaped the notice of either poet or naturalist. It is with these that I think we are to identify the acanthis and acanthyllis of Aristotle, the acanthis of Theocritus, and the acalanthis of Virgil, with which we started this too lengthy discussion. Towards the evening of a hot summer day, when the flocks have to be watered, as he enjoins the shepherd, these little warblers would begin their song afresh, and sing, as does our own Sedge- 1 A sibilant trill is probably what is meant in a passage of the Greek Anthology (i. 175), Xtyupor flop fif van' dcavd/^c ; suggesting the Grasshopper Warbler (see p. 154), or the Sedge- warbler. Warblers in Italy and Greece. warbler, far on into the night. Neither Goldfinch nor Linnet would be likely to sing at that time in a thicket of thorn-bushes : those fairy creatures would be playing in the cool air, or seeking the water for a refreshing bath or draught. There are several other passages in Virgil which invite both translation and discussion ; but I must be content with giving one or two, and must dispense with lengthy remarks on them. Every Latin scholar knows the description, in the first Georgic, of the birds flying shorewards before the storm : Continue, vends surgentibus, aut freta ponti Incipiunt agitata tumescere et aridus altis Montibus audiri fragor, aut resonantia longe Litora misceri et nemoruvn increbrescere murmur. Jam sibi turn curvis male temperat unda carinis, Cum medio celeres revolant ex aequore mergi Clamoremque ferunt ad litora, cumque marinae In sicco ludunt fulicae, notasque paludes Deserit atque altam supra volat ardea nubem. 1 1 Georg. i. 356 foil. I quote this time Mr. R. D. Black- more's admirable rhyming version. Ere yet the lowering storm breaks o'er the land A sullen groundswell heaves along the strand, On mountain heights dry snapping sounds are heard, The booming shores bedrizzled are and blurred, And soughs of wind sigh through the forest stirred. The Birds of Virgil. The words mergi and fulicae in these lines have been the subject of much discussion among com- mentators. That Virgil meant by mergus some particular bird known to himself, there can be little doubt ; for he has transferred to the mergus what Aratus (here his original) says of the Heron (spcoS/oV). And rightly so ; for the Heron never goes out to sea to fish, as it needs standing ground and is no swimmer. This mergus stands probably for the Gull in a generic sense ; Virgil had doubt- less seen them flying to the Campanian coast before a coming storm, and altered Aratus accord- ingly. The fulica marina is translated by Mr. Blackmore 'sea-coot,' which is correct but mean- ingless, and by Mr. Rhoades a 'cormorant'; but in this case we have no means of determining the species of which the poet was thinking. He used The wave already scarce foregoes the hull When homeward from the offing flies the gull, With screams borne inland by the blast ; and when Sea-coots play round the margin of the fen ; The heron quits the marsh where she was bred And soars upon a cloud far overhead. 1 Following Keightley's Commentary, which is the best we possess on Gcorg. i. 351-423. Sun ilc oj the Swallow. 249 the word yWni; a coot, to help him out in naming a bird which was something like a coot, but a bird of the sea, and one for which he had no w r ord ready, or none that would suit his metre. Another beautiful passage is to be found in the twelfth book of the Aeneid ; it is one in which our poet is evidently describing an everyday sight of an Italian spring and summer, and writing independently of an original : Nigra velut magnas domini cum divitis aedes Pervolat et pennis alta atria lustrat hirundo, Pabula parva legens, nidisque loquacibus escas ; Et mine porticibus vacuis, nunc humida circum Stagna sonat : similis medios Juturna per hostes Fertur equis, rapidoque volans obit omnia curru. 1 Though it seems odd to compare to a swallow the fierce female warrior careering in her chariot, it should be noted that Juturna's object is not to fight, but by constant rapidity of movement to keep Turnus and Aeneas from meeting each other. This simile is, I think, the most perfect 1 Aen. xii. 473. Mr. Mackail translates: "As when a black swallow flits through some rich lord's spacious house, and circles in flight in the lofty halls, gathering her tiny food for sustenance to her twittering nestlings, and now swoops down the spacious colonnades, now round the wet ponds," &c. 250 The Birds of Virgil. passage about the Swallow that I have ever met with in poetry. The hirundo of the Romans had of course a generic sense, and included all the different species of Martin and Swallow. When Virgil writes (Georg. iv. 107) of the chattering Jiirundo which hangs its nest from the beams, he clearly means the House-martin ; for the Swallow places his upon the rafters, while the Martin does exactly what Virgil describes. Both Aristotle and Pliny distinguish three or more species of these birds, the Swallow, Sand-martin, Swift, and possibly the Crag-martin ; and their habits seem to have been the same as at the present day. I shall not trouble my readers with any of Virgil's passages 1 about the Hawks and Eagles, in all of which he follows Homer more or less closely. Nor need we pause to dwell on the single passage in which he has mentioned the Nightingale ; for, beautiful as it is, it is not only based on Homer, but is inferior in truth to Homer's lines. The older poet sings truthfully of the Nightingale "sitting in the thick foliage 1 Aen. ix. 564; xi. 721, 751 ; xii. 247. The Nightingale in Virgil. 251 of the trees," and "pouring a many-toned music with many a varied turn ; " but Virgil has neither of these touches. Still his lines have a beauty of their own : Quails populea moerens philomela sub umbra Amissos queritur foetus, quos durus arator Observans nido implumes detraxit ; at ilia Flet noctem, ramoque sedens miserabilc carmen Integrat, et moestis late loca questibus implet. 1 I will finish this chapter by quoting one more passage ; in which I think we may see Virgil's own observation of the habits of birds. It is a famous passage in the sixth Aeneid, where Aeneas has embarked with Charon to cross the Styx, and the ghosts collect upon the bank to beg for passage to the other side ; they gather in numbers, Quam multa in silvis autumai frigore primo Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terrain gurgite ab alto As in the poplar-shade a nightingale Mourns her lost young, which some relentless swain, Spying, from the nest has torn unfledged, but she Wails the long night, and perched upon a spray With sad insistence pipes her dolorous strain, Till all the region with her wrongs o'erflows. Georg. iv. 511. 252 The Birds of Virgil. Quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus, Trans pontum fugat, et terris immittit apricis. 1 This passage is a very embarrassing one, and is not sufficiently cleared up by the commentators. The well-known lines which they quote from Homer (Iliad, iii. 3 foil.), though they may have suggested, are very far from explaining it. The ghosts are praying piteously for passage, and hold out their hands in entreaty, "with strong desire for the further shore : " and they are compared to birds driven on by cold weather, and seeking entrance to warmer lands. Ghosts and birds are alike uneasy ; they long for relief in a home that is now their natural one. So far so good. But the birds are arriving from the sea (gurgite ab alto] in the autumn, and this must be a northern sea, and the coast on which they collect must be the threshold of a more genial climate. Where could Virgil have seen birds collecting on the shore from the North, on their way to the South ? 1 Aen. vi. 309. "Multitudinous as leaves fall dropping in the forests at autumn's earliest frost, or birds swarm landward from the deep gulf, when the chill of the year routs them over seas and drives them to sunny lands." Virgil in Campania and Sicily. 253 Either we must have recourse to the impossible hypothesis that the poet was writing of what he did not understand, or we must recall the fact, which is told us in his life by Suetonius, that he spent a great part of his time in Campania and Sicily, where in an autumn walk by the sea he might have seen what he here refers to. The multitude of migrants from France, Holland, and England take a south-easterly course in their autumn migration, and alight on any resting-place they can find, ships, islands, or wider sea-coasts like those of South Italy and Sicily. Here Virgil, we may be fairly sure, had seen them, and the longing of their hearts had entered into his, and borne fruit in a noble simile that is his, and not another's. Their journey, when he saw them, was not ended ; like the pale and longing ghosts, they had yet another sea to cross, before they could find a winter's home in the secure sunshine of the south. Willow-Warbler's nest. See p, 26. NOTES. NOTE A. (p. 14.) I ORIGINALLY intended to have added* a short chapter to the book upon the Wild Birds Act and the results obtainable from it ; but as other chapters have grown to greater length than I expected, I confine myself to giving in this note, for the convenience of those who are kindly disposed towards the birds, the substance of the Act of 1880, with a few words of explanation. Those who wish for more complete information should send for 'The Wild Birds Protection Acts 1880 and 1881, with Expl natory Notes' (published by Horace Cox, T/ie Field Office, 346 Strand, W.C., price u.). The Act in question, which was the result of most careful consideration by experts outside as well as inside Parliament, and was seen through the House of Commons by L. L. Dillwyn, Esq., M.P., one of a family of naturalists, repealed the then existing Acts relating to Wild Birds, which had been passed in the previous years without sufficient care for all interests. Its main provisions were as follows 1 . To protect all wild birds of every description from being caught or killed between the ist of March and the ist of August. 2. To except from the above plain rule birds caught or killed by the owner or occupier of land on his own land, or by some person authorized by him. 3. To affix as penalties for offences against the above, for first offence, reprimand and discharge on payment of costs ; for subsequent offences, a fine not exceeding five shillings. 256 Notes. 4. To schedule a number of birds which may not be caught or killed even on his own land, by owner or occupier, during the close time, and for the catching or killing of which the penalty is a sum not exceeding one found. These are chiefly ore birds, and a certain number of sea-birds ; but among them are Cuckoo, Curlew, Dotterel, Fern-owl or Goat-sucker, Gold- finch, Kingfisher, Lark, Nightingale, Plover, Sandpiper, and Woodpecker. It will be observed that this Act only protects the living bird of all ages, but not the eggs : so that bird-nesting may still go on with impunity. But the framers of the Act had very good reasons for omitting this, wanton cruelty as it often is ; for as the offenders are usually of tender age, they must be appealed to rather by education and moral suasion than by the terrors of the law. It lies with the clergyman and the school- master to see that gross cruelty meets with its proper punish- ment cruelty such as that which once occurred in my village, where some boys stopped up with clay the hole of a tree in which a Tit had laid her eggs, because it was too small to allow the entrance of the thieving hands. The worst kind of bird-nesting is carried on by boys after they leave the village schoo 1 , when they make this the employ- ment of idle Sundays and holidays. The best remedy for this, and other habits that are worse, is to find other and rational employment for them. Reading-rooms, games, music, etc., I may remark, are usually out of their reach on Sundays, when most of the mischief is done. Notes. 25 7 NOTE B. On the Songs of Birds, (pp. 48 and 149.) As I have some musical knowledge, and have given some attention to the music of birds' songs, it may be worth while to add one or two remarks on a subject which is as difficult as it is pleasing. I need hardly say that birds do not sing in our musical scale. Attempts to represent their song by our notation, as is done, for example, in Mr. Harting's Birds of Middlesex, are almost always misleading. Birds are guided in their song by no regular succession of intervals ; in other words, they use no scale at all. Their music is of a totally different kind to ours. Listen to a Robin in full song; he. like most other birds, hardly ever dwells for a moment on a single note, but modifies it by slightly raising or lowering the pitch, and slides insensibly into another note, which is perhaps instantly forsaken for a subdued chuckle or trill. The same quality of song may also be well observed in the Black-cap and in the Willow Warbler : the song of the latter descends in an almost imper- ceptible manner through fractions of a tone, as I have already observed on page 48. Strange as it may seem, the songs of birds may perhaps be more justly compared with the human voice when speaking, than with a musical instrument, or with the human voice when singing ; and we can no more represent a bird's song in musical notation, than the inflections of Mr. Gladstone's voice when delivering one of his great speeches. The human voice when speaking is musically much freer than when singing ; it is not tied down to tones and semitones. If we remember that there are in our scale only twelve notes to the octave, and that between each of these an infinite number of sounds are possible, we shall get an idea of the endless variety which is open to the birds, and also, but in a less degree, to the human speaking voice. s 258 Notes. Some birds, however, occasionally touch notes of our scale, and sometimes, though rarely, two in succession. The Cuckoo, as has often been noticed, sings a major or a minor third when it first arrives; not that the interval is always exact. The Thrush may now and then repeat two or three notes many times over, which almost, if not quite, answer to notes in our scale, usually from C to F of our treble scale. The Nightingale's crescendo is a good instance of a single definite note ; the song of the Chiff-chaff is perfectly plain and unvaried, but its two notes have never corresponded, when I have tested them, to an interval of our scale. Mr. A. H. Macpherson writes to me (Aug. 1886) that he has heard on the Briinig Pass, in Switzer- land, three Chiff-chaffs singing at once, all in a different pitch. No. i was about a semitone above No. 2 ; No. 2 about a quarter of a tone above No. 3 : the interval being the same in all cases. As my correspondent is a violin-player as well as an ornithologist, his observation may be taken as accurate. The Yellow-hammer's curious song, which I examined carefully, may certainly be given in musical notation as keeping to a single note (often C or C sharp), but the concluding note of the song it is almost impossible to represent, for the pitch of the original note is raised or lowered by an interval varying from a minor third to less than a semitone. It is to be noted that in this species different individuals (according to my observation) have different modifications of the song; the Yellow-hammers in South Dorset (1886) struck me as singing in a different manner from our Kingham birds, though it would be almost impossible to describe the difference. I think I have noticed the same in the case of the Chaffinch. I have a note, made while travelling in Belgium, to the effect that the Chaffinches there did not seem to sing precisely the same song as ours in England. On the other hand, some obser- vations which I made last year on the Chiff-chaffs two notes in different localities led me to believe that the various birds Notes, 259 were all singing at about the same pitch and in much the same manner. There are many other interesting points connected with birds' songs, e.g. the mechanism of the music ; the song as a language; the entire absence of song in many birds, some of which, as the Crow, are among the most highly developed and intelligent ; and the causes which operate in inducing song. It would be well if some well-qualified naturalist would investigate some of these points with greater attention than they have yet received. It would be hardly possible to find a subject of greater interest to the public, as well as to the savant. NOTE C. Fables of the Kingfisher, (p. 242.) It may be worth while to suggest a possible explanation of the origin of the two curious and beautiful fables about this bird mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny, and current in antiquity. The first of these was, that for seven days before and seven days after the shortest winter day, the sea remained calm ; during the first seven (says Aristotle) the bird builds her nest, and in the latter seven occupies herself with eggs and young. The second myth concerned the nest itself: "it is in shape like a cucumber, and larger than the largest sponge ; the mouth is small so small that the sea, as it rises, does not get inside it. It has, however, a great variety of holes, like a sponge, and appears to be made of the bones of a fish ! " This last par- ticular is curious, as we know it to be true of the Kingfisher's nest ; and it has led Prof. Sundevall to believe that Aristotle must have received some authentic report of the real nest, and have mixed it up with the mythical account. But his whole account shows plainly that he imagined the nest to be built on the rocks by the seashore, and perhaps even within reach of the waves. s 2 26 o Notes. Both these fables may, I think, have been built up on a slender basis of fact the only fact which the Greeks seem to have known about the bird. Aristotle (Hist. Anim. v. 8. 4) tells us that the aXmcav was very seldom seen. " It is the rarest of all birds, for it is only seen at the setting of the Pleiades (about Nov. 9) and at the winter solstice ; and it appears at sea- ports flying as much as round a ship, and then vanishing away.' Whether the bird is still seen in Greece only in late autumn and winter I cannot say; but Mr. Seebohm tells us (Brit. Birds, ii. 345) that in Eastern Europe it is compelled by the cold to migrate, some finding their way to Egypt, and therefore necessarily crossing the ^Egean, or passing over Greece or the western coast of Asia Minor. I think it is a fair guess that those known to Aristotle were on their way from Thrace and Scythia to a warmer climate ; and this hypothesis would explain not only their short stay, but their connection with the sea and harbours, and their mysterious character. Even supposing that a few haunted the Greek rivers at other tinier of the year, they would not be often seen there by a people not given either to sporting or to exploring out-of-the-way places; the one fact which would impress itself on the unscientific mind would be the sudden apparition in winter, and especially in mid-winter, of this little blue-green spirit about the harbours, and its as rapid disappearance. If this be so, I think we have not far to seek for the origin of the two fables. Nothing being known of its nesting, it was assumed that it nested at or about the time when it appeared ; and the not unfrequent calm and fine weather of mid-December would confirm the fancy, and give it a new mythical colouring. (The matter-of-fact philosopher does not of course allow that these fine days always occurred in his own experience ; they are not always met, he says (v. 8. 3), in this country at the time of the solstice, " but they always occur in the Sicilian Sea.") When this fable of the nesting-time had once established itself, Notes. 261 it would be not very difficult to find a nest among the curiosities of the sea. So the little blue bird came to suffer " a sea-change, into something rich and strange," through the careless fancy of the imaginative Greek. NOTE D. Redpolls in the Alps. (p. 195.) On page 49 of the first edition of this book there was a paragraph which described the shooting by Anderegg of a Lesser Redpoll (Linota rufescens} on the Engstlen Alp. The date was June 30 (1884), and I had little doubt that the bird (which was a female) was one of a pair which had been breed- ing there. And this idea was confirmed by the discovery of a nest in the same place by Anderegg in May of the present year (1886), which Mr. Scott Wilson, who was with him at the time, considered to belong to the Lesser Redpoll. The form, however, of the Redpoll which is usually found in the Alps is that which is usually called ' Mealy ' (Linota linaria) ; this has been reported by Mr. 'Seebohm as pretty frequent in the Engadine, and by Prof. Newton, on the authority of Colonel Ward, as having been abundant in Canton Vaud in the winter of 1874-5. All the Redpolls I saw last September were, to judge from size and colouring, of this form : so also were all that I have seen in Swiss museums marked as having been shot in the Alps. Believing therefore, on these grounds, and in deference to the arguments of the Rev. H. A. Mac- pherson, that both Mr. Scott Wilson and myself had made a mistake, I struck out the paragraph in question from my second edition. Since doing so, however, I have paid a visit to Cambridge, where Prof. Newton pointed out to me a passage in Prof. Giglioli's recently published catalogue of Italian birds bearing 262 Notes. on the point. He writes without hesitation of Linota rufescens as occasionally breeding in the Italian Alps. This induces me to add this note to the present edition; for if it could be dis- tinctly proved that L. rufescens is f ~und breeding in the Alpine region, new light would be thrown, not only on the curious geographical distribution of this form, but on the abnormal character of the ornithology of the Alps. Prof. Giglioli may be himself mistaken, and as Anderegg and I failed to skin our bird, we cannot produce it as evidence ; but my notes made while examining it point decidedly to L. rufescens rather than L. litiaria, the length, for example, appearing as only four inches. INDEX OF BIRDS MENTIONED IN THE VOLUME. scientific navies are those used in Dresser's List of European Birds?) Accentor, Alpine. Accentor col- laris (Scop.), 95, 196. Accentor, Hedge. Accentor modularis (Linn.), 95. Aquatic Warbler. Acrocephalus aquaticus (Gmel.), 86. Bittern. Botaurus stellaris (Linn.), 85. Blackbird. Turdus merula (Linn.), 31, 60, 82, 88. Blackcap. Sylvia atricapilla (Linn.), 51 foil., 119, 164. Bonelli's Warbler. Phylloscopus Bonellii (Vieill.), 109. Brambling. Frangilla monti- fringilla (Linn.), 172. Bullfinch. Pyrrhula europaea (Vic! I I.), 12, 1 20. Bunting, Corn. Emberiza mi- liaria (Linn.), 139, 149. Bunting, Reed. Emberiza schoeniclus (Linn.), 149. Buzzard. Buteo vulgaris (Leach), Chiffchaff. Phylloscopus colly- bita (Vieill.), 38, 42 foil., 83, 92. Note B. Chough, Alpine. Pyrrhocorax a'pinus (Koch.), 82, 93, 194, 235- Chough, Cornish. Pyrrhocorax graculus (Linn.), 93. Citril Finch. Chrysomitris ci- trinella (Linn.), So, 97. Corncrake. Crex pratensis (Bcc/ist.), 65. Crane. Grus communis (Bechsf.), 224 foil. Creeper. Certhia familiaris (Linn.), 25, 190. Crossbill. Loscia curvirostra (Linn.), 1 83. Crow. Corvus corone (Linn.), 153, 187, 236, 237. Cuckoo. Cuculus canorus (Linn.), 125 128. Curlew. Numenius arquata (Linn.), 143. Dipper. Cinclus aquaticus (Bechst.), 98. Diver, Great northern. Colym- bus glacialis (Linn.), 33. Eagle, Golden. Aquila chry- saetus (Linn.), 92. Fieldfare. Turdus pilaris (Linn.), 35, H3- Flycatcher, Pied. Muscicapa atricapilla (Linn.), 92, 133. Flycatcher, Spotted. Muscicapa grisola (Linn.), 65, 130 134. Garden- warbler. Sylvia salicari (Linn.), 51 foil., 88. Goldfinch. Carduelis elegans (Stcph.), 138, 171, 242. Grasshopper-warb'.er. Locus- tella naevia (Bodd.}, 154 foil 264 Index of Birds. Greenfinch. Ligurinus chloris (Linn.}, 65, 119. Gull, Common. Larus canus (Linn.), 141. Hawfinch. Coccothraustes vul- garis (Pall.), 120. Heron. Ardea cinerea (Linn.'}, 248. Jackdaw. Corvus monedula (Linn.), 232. Jay. Garrulusglandarius (Linn.), 'S3- Kestrel. Falco tinnunculus .(Linn.), 32, 141, 154. Kingfisher. Alcedo ispida (Linn.), 13, 14, 187, 240,241, 260. Lark, Sky. Alauda arvensis (Linn.*), 88. Linnet. Linota cannabina (Linn.), 171, 172, 244. Magpie. Pica rustica (Scop.), 153- Marsh Warbler. Acrocephalus palustris (Bcchst.), 86. Martin, Crag. Chclidon rupes- tris (Scop.), 91, 190. Martin, House. Chelidon urbica (Linn.), 7, 190, 250. Missel-thrush. Turdus visci- vorus (Linn.), 98, 119. Moorhen. Gallinula chloropus (Linn.), 13. Nightingale. Daulias luscinia (Linn.), 66, 161 foil., 250. Nightjar. Caprimulgus euro- paeus (Linn.), 134. Nuthatch. Sitta caesia ( Wolf), 25, 128. Petrel, Stormy. Procellaria pe- lagica (Linn.), 33. Pipit, Tree. Anthus trivialis (Linn.), 153. Pipit, Water (or Alpine). An- thus spinolettn. (Linn.), 94, 194, 196. Plover, Common. Vanellus vulgaris (Beckst.), 101, 143. Ptarmigan. Lagopus mutU3 (Leach),%2, 100. Raven. Corvus corax (Linn.), 232, 234. Redpoll, Lesser. Linota rufes- cens (Vicill\ 21, 193, 262. Redstart. Ruticilla phoenicurus (Linn.), 62, 63, 88, 121. 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