Part 4

The birds are fond of this grotto, and other wild things have found it out. Last summer, when the boulder seemed to be dripping with large juicy crimson honeysuckle berries, I watched a big bullfinch gorging to his heart’s content, his red waistcoat mingling well with the red of the berries. Mrs. Bullfinch was also there, in her less obtrusive grey and browny-black dress, and she had a couple of youngsters too. But do you think the father had any intention of sharing the delicacies? Not a bit of it! Every time his wife approached from the rear surreptitiously to snatch a berry, he turned round and drove her off (I really could have pardoned her if she had joined the suffragettes on the spot). She ranged her family along the orchard rail just above, and made various attempts to forage for them. But it was no use. So she took up her position beside the family on the rail and waited patiently, making plaintive sounds the while, till Mr. Bully had stuffed to repletion and flew away. I was glad there were a few hundred berries still left for the family. And didn’t they have a good time!

Just now the blue tits are very busy about the fruit trees, and a robin comes out from somewhere in the grotto at unexpected moments and stands motionless on a stone, with a bright eye cocked up inquiringly at the human intruder. I fancy he has chosen it for his summer residence.

A squirrel is very attached to this part of the garden. Sometimes one sees him, when the nuts are ripe, scurrying along the orchard rail in ever such a hurry, his chestnut-red tail bigger than himself. There are specially good nuts on that hazel-tree.

This morning I went out of the back-door, to find a large rabbit sitting and sunning himself at his ease among the snowdrops and violets in the little dell—within a yard of the door.

The weather has been like April to-day, brilliant sunshine and heavy showers. Suddenly the sky behind the cottage was lit up with a rainbow—a glorious span of colour that seemed to be resting on the hill-top. Then it dropped a bit lower at one end, and the big pine trees that stand higher up at the top of the orchard looked most majestic against it. Lower it seemed to drop, and then I distinctly saw the place where it touched the ground. You know they say there is a pot of gold buried at the end of the rainbow—where do you think that rainbow pointed? Why, straight at my fairy dell! So I know there is gold buried under that boulder, and that is why there is always sunshine peeping through the green; first it comes out in the yellow jasmine, then it flares in the daffodils, later you find it in the dancing buttercups and in the lovely honeysuckle, finally it waves to you a bright “Good-bye, Summer,” in the clump of golden-rod that is near the entrance.

VI

Dwellers in the Flower-Patch

February on our hills may be anything—from September round to May. Sometimes it is mild and sunny and sweet with the scent of newly-turned earth; or it may be bitingly cold, and very bleak in the exposed parts, with a shivery-ness even in the valleys. You just take your chance, sure, at least, of fresh air, peace—and the birds.

That is one of the perennial joys of the place; summer or winter you know there will be a host of little fluttering things all ready to welcome you as a friend, if you will but show the least bit of friendliness towards them.

Not that their greeting is entirely cordial when you arrive. The starlings are probably the first to see you; they are arrant busybodies, and seem to spend most of their time retailing gossip from the ridge of the red-tiled roof. No wonder their nests are the lazy make-shifts they are!

A perfect scandal to the bird world, Mrs. Missel-Thrush has told me; it’s a wonder the sanitary authorities don’t insist on their being pulled down and rebuilt! Anything, stuffed in anywhere; a handful of straw in the chimney; dried grass and oddments of rubbish collected in a corner under the tiles; you wouldn’t think any self-respecting egg would consent to be hatched out in such a nest!—certainly no young thrush would put up with so disreputable a nursery. But then, as we all know, the thrushes come of very good family; whereas the starlings!—well—not that one would say a word against one’s neighbours, but since everyone can see and hear it for themselves, the starlings are simply “impossible.”

But the starlings don’t seem to be the least bit worried by the cold shoulder of the more exclusive residents; they gabble and bawl the whole day long, from the top of the roof, while the one who has managed to secure the apex of the weathercock is positively insulting. And the moment we turn into the little white gate, they begin.

“See who’s down there? I say, everybody, look! There’s that wretched white dog again! Remember what a perfect nuisance he was last August, when we’d just got the youngsters out of the nest? We were afraid every moment lest he would start to climb the trees like their old cat used to. Hi! there, you on the barn-roof! Have you heard the news?” Shriek, shriek! chatter, chatter, chatter! So they go on for hours at a time.

Then policeman-robin arrives. “What’s all this noise about?” he demands, from the post of the gate leading into the upper orchard. “Oh, good gracious! it’s that horrid white dog again! Nearly shoved his nose right into our nest in the woodruff bank last year! Chit! chit! chit! But don’t you worry, my dear” (this to the lady he has just married); “I’ll drive him away; you can trust to me,” and he flicks his conceited little tail, and flies to the top of a tree stump near by, still calling out his “Chit! chit! chit!” in severe reprimand.

Next the blackbird, hunting for a little fresh meat among the grey, mossed-over stones that edge the garden beds, raises his head and cranes his neck above the overhanging heart’s-ease trails, and the foliage of the pinks, to see what the commotion is all about.

“I say, Martha!” (to the demure body in brown, who has been meekly tracking along behind him), “there’s that terror of a dog again! Recollect when he was here last year? Never a chance to enjoy a snail in peace; before you’d given the shell more than one tap on the stone, down he’d rush. Here he comes now! Slip along quick to the laurels. I say, that was a near shave! Chut! chut! chut! Go away! What business have you to come here disturbing respectable old inhabitants like us?”

And so the hubbub continues, while the small white dog with the brown ears trots in a business-like manner all over the place, making sure that every corner-stone, and bush, and gate-post is just where he left it last time. And having ascertained that the universe is still intact, he sets off to a particular spot in the lower orchard, sniffs about till he finds the identical tuft of grass he is searching for; whereupon he eats, and eats, at the long green blades, much in the same way as we fall on the young lettuces, or the black currants, or whatever else may be in season when we come down. Though why this particular tuft of grass should be the only one he selects out of the acres and acres at his disposal, is always a mystery to us. Yet he never forgets it; straight for that small patch in the middle of the big orchard he makes, once he has done his tour of inspection round the estate.

* * * * *

Before I have been in the house half-an-hour, I start making overtures to the birds, and they immediately respond. I proceed by way of the bird-board.

This may need explanation.

Outside one of the living-room windows I have established a board that projects about a foot beyond the wide window-ledge. At first I had it resting on the window-ledge, but I found that the birds were down out of sight, when they came up to feed, hidden by the sash and window-frame. Therefore I had it raised to bring it exactly on a level with the glass. It is fixed securely on supports, so that it won’t blow away, neither would a flock of jays and wood-pigeons overbalance it. A couple of stout bits of tree branches have been fixed upright at the sides; these are very popular, as they make the board look less bare, more tree-like and familiar to the birds. They love to alight on a branch, before going down to feed, and they often return to the branch when they have eaten their fill, saucing their relations and daring them to touch a morsel of the food, which each bird seems to consider its own exclusive property! Strips of narrow lath have been nailed to the outside edges of the board, projecting about an inch above the level of the board. This wooden rim saves the food from rolling off, or blowing away too easily; it also gives the birds a little perch that they love to stand on while they run their eyes over the menu.

On this board—in times of plenty—go crumbs, seed, rolled oats, maize, peas, little bits of fat or suet, anything in fact that birds will eat; and if the weather be cold, a lump of suet will be lashed to each branch, for the tits to peck at, with occasional bunches of bacon rind, hanging like tassels.

In war-time the birds just have to take what they can get.

Within twenty-four hours of our arrival, the birds have re-discovered their food board, and over they come, from garden and adjoining orchards and woods, with such a whirring of wings, directly they hear the window being opened. In the apple tree, in the laburnum tree, in the damson tree they wait, and the moment I move away from the window, down they pounce, and such a squabbling and chatter and succession of arguments takes place. In a few days’ time, as they get more used to me, they flutter down before I have even spread out their meal, perching on the edge of the board and eyeing me with the most audacious nerve. The robin is positively impudent in his demand that I should hurry up!

And it is not longer than a week before they come hopping right into the room, hunting all over the breakfast table if the window be left open, and I have not been down sufficiently early to meet their requirements. If the days are cold, and outside food scarce, they tap the window sharply with their beaks, to call attention to their needs, while plaintive, appealing little faces look anxiously at me.

* * * * *

And oh, they are such a pretty little crowd. One has no idea what clear, beautifully bright colour our British birds can show, unless one has seen them right away from the taint of smoke and grime. Town environments, be they ever so rural, are always reminiscent of the chimneys in the distance, or the railways that cut them up. But on these hills, where cottage chimneys are very few and far between, and what smoke there is, is usually wood smoke, some of the birds are exceedingly lovely.

There is the great-tit, brilliantly yellow as a daffodil, with an admixture of black velvet and pure white; he and his wife quite take your breath away as they splash down, out of space, and flitter about among the sober thrushes and darker blackbirds. And when, in the summer, they bring their babies along with them, I don’t think there is a prettier sight in creation than the little bluey-grey balls of fluff, that peck daintily at the bits of suet, and then hiss vigorously and scold at the big wasps that come and steal it from under their very beaks! So tame and innocent of fear they are, that they come into the room whenever the window is left open; and mother and father follow them, quite as trustfully.

Then again, we all think we know the blue-tit; but when you see him in the wilds he is a very different-looking morsel from the dirty-blue apology you meet nearer town. On the bird-board, he is almost metallic in the brightness of his blue-green feathers, and the lovely tint of yellow. He raises his crest feathers, with pleasure, when he sees the suet on the branch; and over the little acrobat goes, hanging head downwards or clinging with one tiny claw to a piece of twig; it is all one to him, he swings about like a bright enamel pendant.

The male chaffinch is another very gay little fellow, with his warm red and pretty blue and yellow. He calls “Spink, spink,” in clear penetrating notes, as he lands on the board; and up comes his wife—one of the most shapely and elegant of all the small birds, with the dearest little face!

Mr. and Mrs. Bullfinch invariably come together, unless she is detained at home with the family. They perch on the edge of the drinking saucer, side by side, like a pair of solemn paroquets; he, very beautiful in crimson and black velvet; she, decidedly more homely and nondescript.

But I can’t go through the whole list, there is such a crowd—including a little flock of eight goldfinches that for two winters have always been about the garden together.

Jays, with their handsome wing feathers and ugly, very ugly, mouths, swoop down continually, scaring the small birds to vanishing point, and gobbling up the food by the shovelful! Magpies in plenty perch on the garden rails, but only once has one come to the board when I have been there, and then he got his tail so mixed up with the decorative branches, that he had the fright of his life, and never repeated the adventure.

Wood pigeons are regular in their attendance, when other food is scarce. Oh, certainly, I know all that is to be said on the subject of encouraging wood pigeons! But—have you ever studied the peacock and wine-colour gleam on their necks, when unsmirched by smoke or grime? If so, you will understand my admiration for them. And, in any case, ours isn’t a farming area; there is no corn here for them to squander, and although they sigh all summer long, in the fir trees, “Take _two_ pears, Tommy! Take _two_ pears, Tommy!—_do!_” there are very few pears available that Tommy would even look at; most that grow in the orchards around are the harsh, bitter variety, used for making the drink known as “perry” (the pear equivalent of apple cider).

The wood pigeons have helped me back to health and strength many a time, with their soft crooning in the larches, and their quiet talk of things above the petty strife and noisy clamour of the struggling market place. Therefore, I don’t say them nay, in times of plenty, if I have a little to spare, and they chance to need it.

* * * * *

Of all the bird family, however, I think the coal-tits are our favourites—and there are _such_ a quantity of them. Coal-tits always abound in the neighbourhood of larch woods and birches, which accounts for the numbers that dart about my garden; there are birch woods lower down the hill below the cottage, as well as the larch woods up above; and both birch and larch cluster thick down one side of the house to shield it from the cold winds.

Though the coal-tit is not brightly-coloured, like its relations, there is something very delightful about his soft grey garb, and his black head with its light grey or nearly white streak down the back. Like the robin, he always looks well-tailored, not a feather out of place, not a draggled filament anywhere. And he is so extraordinarily alert; he doesn’t seem to give himself time to fly, he darts and dives and flits all over the place, and seems to have an appetite proportionately equal to that of the proverbial alderman.

Down he dives the minute the food appears. He stands very erect on his slim little legs (no squatting down on his breast bone, as the sparrows and even the chaffinches often do); he cocks his head from side to side, promptly decides on the largest lump of fat he can find; seizes it, and flies up into a big fir tree, where, apparently, he bolts the whole lump instantaneously! At any rate, before you have time to see where he alighted, down he dives, seizes another big piece, and off he goes again. He seems to eat twice his own size in suet in a few minutes! But I conclude he must drop some of it, though I’ve never been able to prove it. And the theory of a nestful of hungry beaks doesn’t always explain his voraciousness; for he disposes of just as much in the winter as in nesting time.

Yet, in spite of his appetite, we love him, for he is so tiny and so wonderfully alert; one marvels how so much energy can be boxed up in such a small body.

* * * * *

Visitors who have never had much to do with birds at close quarters—and the birds may be said to be part of the family at this cottage, for they live with us and meal with us—are usually surprised at the differences and the distinctiveness of their various personalities.

The robin not only adopts you at once, but he proceeds to supervise your every action, and instals himself as your personal attendant. Probably this is all the more emphasized by the fact that he will not allow any rival to encroach on his particular territory. Most birds seem to peg out a claim at the beginning of the season, and to resent, more or less, the intrusion of any other of its own kind. Swallows and sparrows and rooks, and a few others, build in colonies, but the majority of birds seem to prefer a little domain each to himself, wife and family, and you will find one pair of blackbirds driving another from the laurel bush they have chosen, or chasing strangers from the particular garden path they call their own.

Though starlings feed—and chatter—in flocks, one particular pair of starlings make it their business to oust any other starling that they find on the bird board.

But the robin can be a perfect terror in the way he seeks to domineer over the whole earth. It is a very large area that he marks off for his individual own, and woe betide any other robin who tries to defy him—unless he be the stronger of the two. One of our robins killed his own wife (we conclude, as she disappeared, after a series of thrashings he gave her daily!), and then he injured the wing of one of his own youngsters, because we had petted them, and given them food inside the living room.

The father used to hide behind a stone down on the garden bed, and watch as his family—the mother and two babies—nervously and timidly approached the bird-board, looking round anxiously lest father should see! Then, when they started to feed, he would hiss out the dreadfullest of wicked words at them, and fling himself on them, bashing them with his beak—a positive little fury.

So one day I put some food on the table inside the room, and the down-trodden ones hopped in. I shut the window before the irate father could follow them. He seemed demented with rage, when he saw them feeding and couldn’t get at them; he literally stamped his foot, and viciously tossed off all the pieces of food that were on the board, flinging them to the ground in a most highly-glazed specimen of temper!

I let the family out by a side window, instead of the bird-board window, and they evaded their loving and affectionate relative for a little while. But he found them at last; and went for his wife, while the children cheeped forlornly among the pansies in the border. We never saw her again, poor, plucky little soul; and one of the youngsters dragged a broken wing along the path next day, explaining to me, pitifully, that he couldn’t possibly get up to the bird-board now, neither could he find mother anywhere.

I took him in, and tried to save his life—but it was no use. With all our knowledge and skill and discoveries and training, what clumsy, inadequate creatures we are in comparison with a little mother bird!

* * * * *

Less harrowing was the incident of a robin who, on one occasion, came inside, in order to get more than his share of provender if possible, when he was suddenly startled by the dog running into the room. Instead of flying through the window that was open, he made for a closed one, banging his head with such force against the glass that the blow stunned him, and he fell senseless to the ground.

I picked him up, and tried all the restoratives I could think of, a drop of water on his beak, a cold splash on his head, but to no purpose; he lay, just a tiny handful of beautiful feathers, in my hand; so light, so helpless, so altogether pathetic—it hurt me badly to gaze at the small mite that only the minute before had been talking to me, and cheeking me, and liking me (yes, I am sure he did), and I unable now to do a thing to bring back the gaiety and life and sparkle to the poor still body.

I felt sure he was dead, yet to give him every chance, I placed him in a nest of soft flannel out on the window-ledge; the day was warm, but there was a breeze that might perhaps revive him. And as a last offering—one does so try to do all one can!—I put a tempting piece of suet near his inanimate beak. And how unnatural it seemed to see that suet remain untouched in his vicinity!

I took my work and sat where I could see if he so much as stirred a claw. But for a quarter of an hour there wasn’t the slightest sign of movement, except when the wind gently ruffled his feathers—and how exquisite they were, the blue so unlike the ordinary blue, the red much more red than the London robins, and the bronze-brown so glinting.

At last I decided it was useless to watch any longer, for his eyelids had never so much as flickered.

I was folding up my work, when a big yellow tit flew on to the window ledge, hopped over inquiringly to the suet, and started to sample it. In an instant up jumped the corpse, and with an angry “Chit! chit!” hurled himself at the interloper; and the last I saw of him was chasing the yellow tit all across the garden.

Don’t ask me to explain; I am only telling you what happened under my own eyes.

* * * * *

Yes, robin _père_ can be a villain; he also can be the extreme reverse. Like the majority of the rest of us, he shows to the most amiable advantage when there is no rival to distract public admiration. So long as he is the centre, as well as the beginning and the end, of the bird universe, he is sweetness itself.

No other bird is so keenly alive to all my comings and goings. It doesn’t matter how fully occupied he may be with the settlement of every other bird’s affairs, I have but to go up the garden with fork or spade or broom, and before I have turned half-a-dozen clods, or pulled out a handful of weeds, I am conscious of a soft streak through the air, though I hardly see it; there he sits on a low branch of a currant bush close to my hand, or stands motionless on an edging stone at my very feet. If I take no notice of him, in all probability he starts a Whisper Song to call attention to himself.

Have you ever heard this? It suggests nothing so much as elf-land music; I know no song exactly like it. You seem to hear a bird warbling most delightfully, but it is far, far away. You raise your eyes, and scan the trees around, but no singing bird can you discover; you decide it must be farther off—but what a haunting charm there is about it.

Then it ceases. Mr. Robin is hoping that you have understood what he has been saying. But no, the obtuse human just goes on weeding the path as before; so the Whisper Song starts again. This time you think it resembles a very mellow musical box shut up in some distant room.

Suddenly you see him, singing straight at you, so close to your hand that it gives you quite an uncanny feeling for the moment; and you wonder: Who is he—what is he—that he should be saying all this to me, obviously to me, and to no one else but me?

Robin doesn’t encourage you in daydreams, however, he means business; and once he sees that he has secured your undivided attention, he discards the Whisper Song and comes to the point. Down on to the path he drops, seizes an unwary worm that your energy has brought to light; then tosses it over scornfully and flirts a contemptuous tail, which says as plainly as any tale that was ever told, “Is _that_ the best worm you can offer a gentleman? Pouf!”

He eats it nevertheless.