Moorland Idylls

Is not the donkey himself a product of somewhat similar conditions? Oriental in his origin, he seems to be merely the modern representative of those ancestral horses which did not succeed in the struggle for existence. Every intermediate stage has now been discovered between the true horses, with their flowing tails and silky coats, and the true donkeys, with their tufted tails and shaggy hair, the middle terms being chiefly found in the northern plains of Asia. Now, our horses, I take it, are the descendants of those original horse-and-donkey-like creatures which took to the grassy meadows, and so waxed fat, and kicked, and developed exceedingly; while our donkeys, I imagine, are the poor, patient offspring of those less lucky brothers or cousins which were pushed by degrees into the deserts and arid hills, and there grew accustomed to a very sparse diet of the essentially prickly and thorny shrubs which always inhabit such spots, just as gorse and heather inhabit our British uplands. That is why the donkey thrives so excellently to this day on thistles and nettle-tops: they represent the ancestral food of his kind for many generations. Certainly, at the present time, wherever we find horses wild it is in broad, grass-clad plains, or steppes, or pampas; wherever we find donkeys, or donkey-like animals, wild, it is among desert or half-desert rocks, and on arid hillsides. It would seem as though the horse was in the last resort a donkey grown big and strong by dint of good living and free space to roam over; while the donkey, on the other hand, is in the last resort a horse grown small and ill-proportioned through want of good food and insufficient elbow-room. It is noteworthy that in small islands, like the Shetlands, small breeds of horses are developed in adaptation to the environment; though, the food being still good pasture in a well-watered country, they retain in most respects their horse-like aspect. But a vengeance o’ Jenny’s case! I have wandered far afield from Peter Rashleigh’s donkey, to have got so soon into evolutionary biology!

XX.

A LIFE-AND-DEATH STRUGGLE

It isn’t often a man can stand at his own drawing-room window and be the interested spectator at a combat of wild beasts, where one antagonist not only conquers, but also fairly devours the other! Yet such Roman sport I have just this moment been unlucky enough to witness. Unlucky enough, I say, because the victor did not first kill and then eat his victim, as any combatant with a spark of chivalry in his nature would have done, but slowly chewed him up alive before my eyes, with no more consideration for the feelings of the vanquished than if the unfortunate creature had been a vegetable. I don’t mean to pretend it was tiger versus cobra. The assailant was a thrush, the defender an earthworm. Now, thrushes, we all know, are sweet songsters when they have dined. Has not George Meredith hymned them, as Shelley the skylark? But if you want to see the poetry taken clean out of a thrush, just watch him as he catches and devours an earthworm! The poor unsuspicious annelid, feeling the joy of spring stir in his sluggish veins, comes to the surface for a moment in search of those fallen leaves which form the staple of his blameless vegetarian diet. No mole shakes the earth; the sod is fresh and moist; here seems a propitious moment for an above-ground excursion. So the earthworm pokes out his head and peers around him inquiringly; peers, I venture to say, blind beast though he be, because his method of feeling his way and exploring by touch is so human and inquisitive. But embodied Fate is on the watch, silent, keen-eyed, immovable; and no sooner does that slimy soul poke his nose above the ground than the thrush is upon him, quick and deadly as lightning. In one second the creature feels himself seized by one of his scaly rings, held fast in an iron vice, and slowly chewed piecemeal with the utmost deliberation. He wriggles and squirms, but all in vain; the thrush munches calmly on, now with this side of his bill, now that, drawing the worm ring by ring from the soil to which he desperately clings, and enjoying him as he goes with most evident gusto.

Both are intruders here. When first we came to our hilltop there were no thrushes and no earthworms, no house-martins and no sparrows. But the building of one simple red-tiled cottage set up endless changes in the fauna and flora. A whole revolution was inaugurated over a realm of three acres. The house-martins were the first to come; they settled in before us. Ancestral instinct has taught them to know well that where a house is built there will be eaves to nest under, and people will inhabit it, who throw about meat and fruit, which attract the flies; and flies are the natural diet of house-martins. The sparrows came next; but the thrushes loitered longer. And the manner of their coming was after this fashion —

The powers that be had decided on a tennis-lawn. Previously nothing but heather and gorse spread over the hilltop; that is the native vegetation of this light sandstone upland. But in order to have tennis you must needs have a sward; so, much against the grain, we grubbed up wild heath enough to make a court, and sowed it for a tennis-lawn. Grass cannot grow, however, on such poor light soil as suits heather best, so we imported a few cartloads of mould and manure from a farm in the valley. With the mould came worms, who, finding a fair field, began to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth with laudable rapidity. Few or no earthworms live in the shallow sand of the open moor; and, though a mole or two can just eke out a precarious living here and there in the softer and grassier hollows – I see their mounds every day as I cross the common – worms are not nearly abundant enough to tempt the epicurean and greedy thrushes from the shelter of the valley. For the mole, you see, goes out hunting underground on the trail of the earthworm; but the thrush must needs depend upon the few stray stragglers which come to the surface morning and evening.

No sooner had worms begun to make castings on the lawn, however, than some Columbus thrush discovered a new world was opened to him. He and his mate took formal possession of the patch of green, which they hold as their own, using it regularly as a private hunting-ground. Every other tennis-lawn in the neighbourhood similarly supports its pair of thrushes, as (according to the poet) every rood of ground in England once “maintained its man.” One of our neighbours has three lawns, terraced off in steps, and each has been annexed by a particular thrush family, which holds it stoutly against all comers. It is a curious sight in spring, when the nestlings are young, to see the parent birds going carefully over the ground – surveying it in squares, as it were – the cock a little in front, the hen hopping after him at some distance on one side, and making sure that not an inch of the superficial area remains unhunted. They eat many snails, too, breaking the shells against big stones; and they hunt for slugs now and then in the moist ditch by the roadway. While the nestlings are unfledged the industry of the elder birds is ceaseless; for they lay in early spring, and have to rear their young while food is still far from cheap or abundant. And, oh! but it is a gruesome sight to see them teaching the young idea of their kind how to tackle a worm – how to drag him from his burrow, ring after ring, as he struggles, to chop him up and mangle him till resistance and escape are absolutely hopeless, and then to devour him piecemeal. But in autumn the fierce heart of the carnivore softens; worms being then scarce, he condescends to berries.

XXI.

THE SHRIKE’S LARDER

Yes; there is no denying it – this is a shrike’s larder! The poor small beasts impaled here must have been hung upon thorns by that cruelest of executioners. The hoard belongs, I think, to a red-backed shrike, whom I have seen more than once flitting through the trees of this copse on the hillside; for the great grey shrike has gone long since – he comes to us only as a winter visitor in the hardest seasons – while woodchats and smaller grey shrike hardly occur at all in this out-of-the-way district. Indeed, the red-backed bird is the only true-born Briton of the entire family; he alone nests and rears his young here regularly. Butcher-birds, the gamekeepers call them, and well they deserve the title; for they catch and spit alive on the thorns of their larder all the bumble-bees and beetles, all the field-mice and robins they can swoop down upon and surprise from their bosky ambush. Cruel and ruthless birds, they seize whatever they can hold; but, instead of killing and eating their prey at once, they keep it deliberately alive as long as possible, on the stout thorn of a sloe-tree. Look at that poor shrew-mouse, for example, wriggling feebly on his stake, which the cunning bird has so managed to intertwine among the twigs as to make escape impossible; he must have been hanging there in torture for a week by his look, but the shrike will not eat him till the last possible moment, unless so minded. And that poor lizard, again, with his wonderful tenacity of life; he may have been impaled for a fortnight, yet the skin on his ribs still rises and falls with a faint breathing action. More merciful than nature, we will put him out of his pain; though, after all, what good have we done by it? The shrike will catch another to replace him.

We talk of beautiful instincts and beautiful adaptations, so I suppose we may also talk of hateful ones; and this instinct of the shrike’s is decidedly hateful. Yet such conduct is the rule in the world of animals: each species thinks only of its own comfort and pleasure; none takes the slightest heed of the pains of others. As Tennyson put it long ago —

“Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;The mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear’d by the shrike,And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.”

Assuredly no creature is worse in this respect than our red-backed butcher-bird. Yet he is a handsome wretch, for all that, especially in his beautiful and delicate spring plumage, when he first returns to us from his African winter quarters – chestnut and reddish brown above, melting into dainty grey-blue about the head and neck, not unrelieved by bold patches of pure black and pure white on the tail and forehead. Moreover, strange to say, he is an accomplished musician. But there is an ugly look about him, none the less, for all his fine song and all his fine feathers. He has a cruel, falcon-like expression of face; and any one who has ever seen him engaged in calmly spiking a harvest-mouse or a frog on a thick spine of blackthorn, without the faintest regard to his helpless victim’s writhing, cannot fail to recognize the evil element in his eye, whenever he gives one the rare chance of viewing him.

Old-fashioned ornithologists used to think the shrikes were related to the birds of prey; and, indeed, they do somewhat resemble the smaller hawks in external features. But the likeness is purely superficial and adaptive – curved bill, strong talons, hard bristles on the beak, the keen eye of the hunter: it is the kind of similarity that must always exist among animals whose mode of life is closely similar. We know nowadays that structure depends upon habit, not habit upon structure. If you take to earning your living by rapine, you will acquire certain traits of strength and keenness inevitable in predatory forms; and that is why the shrikes, which are related by descent to the wrens and thrushes, have grown to resemble in external conformation the sparrowhawks and kestrels.

On the rare occasions when you do catch sight of a shrike, he is usually seated, half in ambush, on some perch in a tall hawthorn, or even openly on the telegraph-wires that cross a patch of likely hunting country. There he peers about and watches with his keen hazel eyes till mouse, frog, or lizard, bee, beetle, or dragon-fly, stirs in the meadow beneath him. Then, swift as thought, he swoops down upon his quarry from his invisible seat, not hovering and casting a telltale shadow like the hawk, but waiting his chance unseen under cover of the thicket. His favourite food, indeed, consists of bees and other soft-bodied insects; these he generally eats at once, returning forthwith to his perch and his peering. But if he catches any bigger prey, such as a frog, a field-mouse, a tomtit, or a partridge chick, he flies off with it to the larder, and there spears the wretched victim on a stout sharp spine, to devour it at his leisure. Even beetles and dragon-flies he will sometimes keep in stock, especially if his appetite is assuaged for the moment. Nevertheless, the butcher-bird is in the main an insect-eater; he is commonest on warm sandy soils, like that of these Surrey moors, where bumble-bees and cockchafers abound, and enable him to make an easy living. Indeed, all beasts and birds are mostly regulated in their distribution by the abundance or scarcity of their food or prey. Shrikes have, doubtless, no native objection to cold thick clay, as such; but bees being rare on moist soils, and field-mice or lizards still rarer, the shrike learns to avoid damp, chilly bottoms as herbivores avoid a dry desert country.

XXII.

NESTS AND NO NESTS

Strolling across the moor in the sunshine to-day, past the lonely pine where the night-jar sits crooning to his lady-love in the twilight, I came suddenly across his grey mate herself, and saw her flutter up sleepily in dazed surprise from the bare ground where she was sitting. As she flapped her mottled wings and sailed slowly away, like a blinking owl disturbed in the daytime, I noticed that I had lighted unawares upon her nest, or rather, her eggs, for she lays them on the open, without bed of any sort. I left them untouched, for I am no collector. A few minutes later, I came abreast of the low cliff where the sand-martins have established their twittering colony. The soft yellow sandstone that forms the cutting is honey-combed with their tunnels; and as I leaned on my stick and looked, I saw the busy brown birds gliding in and out, with their long curved flight, and carrying back mouthfuls of gnats and mayflies to their fledgelings in the burrows. It was beautiful to watch them swooping in great arcs over the gorse and bracken, and then darting straight, with unerring accuracy, to the mouth of their tunnels. They alight at the very door with all the skill of born pilots, never missing or overshooting the mark by one inch, but steering upon it so truly that they look as though failure or miscalculation were impossible.

These two little episodes coming together set me thinking; ’tis a bad habit one indulges in when one walks too much alone in the open. In towns one doesn’t think, because the shop-windows, and the horses, and the noise, and the people, and the omnibuses distract one; but in the country, one gives way a great deal too readily to what Plato calls the “divine disease” of thinking. I began to philosophize. How curious, I said to myself, that we have but five kinds of bird in England that hawk on the wing after insects in the open; and of all those five, not one builds a proper respectable nest, woven of twigs and straws, like a sparrow or a robin! Every one of them has some peculiar little fancy of his own – goes in for some individual freak of originality. The night-jar, which is the simplest and earliest in type of the group, lays its eggs on the bare ground, and rises superior in its Spartan simplicity to such petty luxuries as beds and bedding. The swift, that ecclesiologically-minded bird, which loves the chief seats in the synagogue, the highest pinnacles of tower or steeple, gums together a soft nest of floating thistle-down and feathers, by means of a sticky secretion from its own mouth, distilled in the last resort from the juices of insects. The swallow and the house-martin, again, make domed mud huts, and line them inside with soft floating material. Finally, the sand-martin excavates with its bill the soft sandstone of cliffs or roadside cuttings, and strews a bed within for its callow young of cotton-grass and dandelion parachutes.

Why this curious variety among themselves, and this equally curious divergence from the common practice of bird-kind in general? Clearly, thought I, it must bear some definite relation to the habits and manners of the birds which exhibit it. Let me think what it means. Aha, aha, eureka! I have found it! The insect-hawking birds are not a natural group; by descent they have nothing at all to do with one another. Closely as the swift resembles the swallow in form, in flight, in shape of bill, in habits and manners, we now know that the swift is a specialized woodpecker, while the swallow and the martins are specialized sparrows. (I use both words, bien entendu, in quite their widest and most Pickwickian evolutionary acceptation.) The swift and the night-jar belong to one great family of birds; the swallow, the house-martin, and the sand-martin to another. The likeness in form and in mode of flight has been brought about by similarity in their style of living. Two different birds of two different types both took, ages since, to hawking after flies and midges in the open air. Each group was thus compelled to acquire long and powerful wings, a light and airy body, a good steering tail, a wide gape of mouth, and a rapid curved flight, so as to swoop down upon and catch its petty prey unsuspected. So, in the long run, the two types which hawk most in the open, the swifts and the swallows, have grown so like that only by minute anatomical differences can we refer the remoter ancestry of one species to the woodpeckers and humming-birds, and the remoter ancestry of the other to the tits and sparrows.

How does their manner of life affect their mode of nesting, however? Indirectly, in this way. Birds that live largely off seeds and fruits and hard-shelled beetles, have hard short beaks to grind their food with, and sit much in thickets, scrub, or hedgerows. But birds that hawk on the wing after small soft flies must have wide soft bills, and a gaping mouth; they can hardly perch at all on trees or bushes, and their feet are too weak to be of much use for walking. Indeed, if a swift once alights on the ground, he can scarcely get up again, so difficult is it for the long wings to work in a narrow space, and so slight a power of jumping have the feeble little legs. Hence it follows that birds of the hedgerow type can readily build nests of twigs and straws, which they gather as they perch, or seek on the ground; and they are enabled to weave them with their hard bills and active feet; while birds of the hawking type cannot pick up sticks or gather straws on the ground, and have beaks quite unadapted for dealing with such intractable materials. The consequence is they have been compelled to find out each some new plan for itself, and to build their nest out of such stray material as their habits permit them.

The night-jar, a stranded nocturnal bird of early type, with very few modern improvements and additions, solves the problem in the easiest and rudest way by simply going without a nest at all, and laying her eggs unprotected in the open. Nocturnal creatures, indeed, are, to a great extent, the losers in the struggle for existence; they always retain many early and uncivilized ways, if I may speak metaphorically. They are the analogues of the street arabs who sleep in Trafalgar Square under shelter of a newspaper. The sand-martin, an earlier type than the swallow or the house-martin, burrows in sandstone cliffs, which are pre-human features, though man’s roads and railways have largely extended his field of enterprise. But the house-martin and the swallow, later and far more civilized developments, have learned to take advantage of our barns and houses; they nest under the eaves; and being largely water-haunters, skimming lightly over the surface of ponds and lakes, they have naturally taken advantage of the mud at the edges as a convenient building material. Last of all, the soaring swift, the most absolutely aërial type of the entire group, unable to alight on the ground at all, has acquired the habit of catching cottony seeds, and thistle-down, and floating feathers in his mouth as he flies, and gumming them together into a mucilaginous nest with his own saliva. The Oriental sea-swifts have no chance of finding even such flying materials among their caves and cliffs, and they have consequently been driven into erecting nests entirely of their own inspissated saliva, without any basis of down or feathers. These are the famous edible birds’-nests of the Chinese; they look like gelatine, and they make excellent soup, somewhat thick and gummy.

XXIII.

THE CROUCH OAK

The old Crouch Oak on Walford Green is one of the sights of Surrey. It raises its gnarled and hollow trunk in the centre of the Ploy-Field, an ancient common meadow, and though decayed in its heart, is reckoned still among the principal bounds of Ringmer Forest. Its girth at the height of a man’s arms is over twenty feet. Beneath its spreading branches stands an upright stone of immemorial antiquity, which only the righteous wrath of a local archæologist succeeded in preserving a few years since from the modern desecration of a Jubilee inscription. This close combination of sacred tree and sacred stone is frequent and significant; it occurs all the world over, from Britain to the New Hebrides; it is found in India, in Syria, in Germany, in Ceylon, in civilized Rome, in barbaric New Guinea. Wherever the sacred tree spreads its brooding circle of welcome shade, there under its huge boughs the sacred stone bears witness to antique or still surviving rites of human sacrifice.

It is this, indeed, that gives our British Gospel Oaks their unique interest amid the public monuments of England. Alone among the temples of our old heathen faith they have outlived the overwhelming deluge of Christianity. In the south of Europe we have still the Parthenon and the columns of Pæstum to testify boldly to the older creeds. In the north, where temples made with hands were rarer, where art had not learned to raise such colossal piles as Karnak or Denderah, the sacred oak alone remains to us now as a lingering memorial of the cult of our ancestors. Even these, too, have been Christianized, in accordance with Gregory’s well-known advice to Augustine. The holy sites of the ancient faiths, said the wise Pope, in his epistle, were still to be respected; but the demons who inhabited them were to be exorcised by the use of Christian symbols, and the temples were to be sanctified to Christian worship. In accordance with this policy, a figure of the cross was marked upon the bark of the old sacred tree in Walford Ploy-Field, which thus became known as the Crouch or Cross Oak; for the Latin crux came first into our language under the truer English form of crouch, and only assumed its later pronunciation of cross under northern influences. Similar Christianization of holy oaks, shire oaks, boundary oaks, Druid oaks, and other heathen temples or heathen termini, went on all over England; so that what were once Thunor’s trees and Woden’s trees, or still earlier, the sacred haunts of native Celtic deities, became in the end those “Gospel Oaks,” under which, at the annual beating of the bounds, the priest stopped with his acolytes to read a few verses of St. Luke or St. Matthew. Sometimes, indeed, hardly more than the memory of some particular episode in the history of the sacred tree now survives, as at Addlestone, near Chertsey, where there is also a crouch oak, chiefly famous at present from a local tradition that Wickliffe once preached under its canopy of branches. But the older holy and even phallic virtue of this sacred trunk is proved by the fact that decoctions of its bark taken internally, after a well-known and almost world-wide fashion, are still considered by the girls of the village to operate as a love-charm.

The history of these ancient trees, so far as we can reconstruct it from the piecemeal evidence, is picturesque and singular. Originally, I believe, they were planted as saplings over the barrow or tumulus of some barbaric chieftain; not a few of them, indeed – like the King’s Oak at Tilford, near Farnham – still retain some title which recalls their royal or funereal origin. The sacred stone, which in every case seems once to have stood under their dense shade, was doubtless at first the standing-stone or gravestone of the buried chief; though later it probably served as an unhewn altar for the village sacrifices, like that offering of the lamb which till recent years was still torn to pieces on an anniversary festival in the Ploy-Field at Holne, in Devonshire. Every year, in point of fact, the people of each village used once to perambulate their bounds, as at the Roman Terminalia, and offer up at each holy tree and each terminus stone, which formed the main landmarks, a human sacrifice. The victims were usually boys – most probably captives from neighbouring tribes or villages; failing that, they were “bought with a price” within the tribe itself from their unnatural parents. Traces of these customs survive all the world over, while the practice itself is closely bound up with the worship of Terminus and other boundary spirits. In later and milder days, however, though the habit of beating the bounds survived, the incidents that accompanied it were considerably mitigated. The ceremony at first was essentially an exorcism, or driving of evil spirits beyond the village limits; and the boys seem to have been slaughtered as boundary guardians, in order that their ghosts might protect and maintain the local frontier. They were also scourged before being put to death, after a common superstition, so that their tears might act as a sympathetic rain-charm. But in later Christian days it began to be felt that to read the Gospels under the sacred oak of the boundary would sufficiently drive away all evil influences; and though the boys were still beaten at each terminus as a rain-charm, the meaning of the incident was so wholly forgotten that it was commonly interpreted as a means of impressing the boundaries on their memories – a foolish gloss of the usual fatuous eighteenth-century rationalizing type. Thus the Gospel Oak at Cheriton is now only remembered as the tree under which the Gospel was read at the perambulation of the bounds; the Crouch Oak at Addlestone has sunk into a prosaic legal boundary-mark of Windsor Forest; and the Twelve Apostles at Burley, near Ringwood, now reduced to five, have been finally Christianized out of all recognition, so that I cannot even conjecturally reconstruct their original dedication to some ancient Celtic or Teutonic deities.