CHAPTER III

THE CARRION CROW IN THE BALANCE

The crow in London--Persecuted in the royal parks--Degradation of Hyde Park--Ducks in the Serpentine: how they are thinned--Shooting a chicken with a revolver--Habits of the Hyde Park mallard--Anecdotes--Number of London crows--The crow a long-lived bird; a bread-eater--Anecdote--Seeks its food on the river--The crow as a pet--Anecdotes.

The carrion crow has probably always been an inhabitant of the central parks; at all events it is well known that for a long time past a pair bred annually in the trees on the north side of the Serpentine, down to within the last three years. As these birds took toll of the ducks' eggs and ducklings when they had a nest full of ravenous young to feed, it was resolved that they should no longer be tolerated; their nests were ordered to be pulled down and the old birds shot whenever an opportunity offered. Now it is not the Hyde Park crows alone that will suffer if this policy be adhered to, but the London crows generally will be in danger of extermination, for the birds are constantly passing and repassing across London, visiting all the parks where there are large trees, on their way to and from their various feeding-grounds. Hyde Park with Kensington Gardens is one of their favourite stopping places; one or more pairs may be seen there on most mornings, frequently at noon again on their return to Richmond, Kew, and Syon Park, and to the northern heights of London. On the morning of October 10, 1896, I saw eight carrion crows, in pairs, perched at a considerable distance apart on the elm-tops near the palace in Kensington Gardens. After calling for some time on the trees, they began to pursue and buffet one another with violence, making the whole place in the meantime resound with their powerful, harsh, grating cries. Their mock battle over, they rose to a considerable height in the air and went away towards Hammersmith. It seemed to me a marvellous thing that I had witnessed such a scene in such a place. But it is not necessary to see a number of carrion crows together to feel impressed with the appearance of the bird. There are few finer sights in the wild bird life of London than one of these visitors to the park on any autumn or winter morning, when he will allow you to come quite near to the leafless tree on which he is perched, to stand still and admire his massive raven-like beak and intense black plumage glossed with metallic green, as he sits flirting his wings and tail, swelling his throat to the size of a duck's egg, as, at intervals, he pours out a succession of raucous caws--the cry of a true savage, and the crow's 'voice of care,' as Chaucer called it.

The crow is, in fact, the grandest wild bird left to us in the metropolis; and after corresponding and conversing with a large number of persons on the subject, I find that in London others--most persons, I believe--admire him as much as I do, and are just as anxious that he should be preserved. It may be mentioned here that in two or three of the County Council's parks the superintendents protect and take pride in their crows. Why, then, should these few birds, which Londoners value, be destroyed in the royal parks for fear of the loss of a few ducklings out of the hundreds that are annually hatched and reared?

The ducks in the Serpentine are very numerous; many bucketfuls of food--meal and grain--are given to them every day when they congregate at the boat-house, and they get besides large quantities of broken bread cast to them by the public; all day long, and every day when it is not raining, there is a continual procession of men, women, and children bringing food for the birds. Is it permissible to ask for whose advantage this large number of ducks is reared and fattened for the table at so small a cost? Hyde Park is maintained by the nation, and presumably for the nation; it is a national as well as a royal park; is it not extraordinary that so noble a possession, the largest and most beautiful open space in the capital of the British empire, the chief city of the world, should be degraded to something like a poultry farm, or at all events a duck-breeding establishment, and that in order to get as much profit as possible out of the ducks, one of the chief ornaments of the park, the one representative of noble wild bird life that has survived until now in London, should be sacrificed?

Let us by all means have ducks, and many of them; they are gregarious by nature and look well in flocks, and are a source of innocent pleasure to numberless visitors to the parks, especially to children and nursemaids; but let us not have ducks only--a great multitude of ducks, to the exclusion of other wilder and nobler birds.

Personally, I am very fond of these ducks, although I have never had one on my table, and believe that I am as well able to appreciate their beauty and feel an interest in their habits as any of the gentlemen in authority who have decreed that the carrion crow shall go the way of the raven in Hyde Park. I love them because they are not the ducks that have been made lazy and fat, with all their fine faculties dulled, by long domestication. They are the wild duck, or mallard, introduced many years ago into the Serpentine. Doubtless they have some domestic taint in them, since the young birds reared each season exhibit a very considerable variation in colour and markings. Those that vary in colour are weeded out each winter, and the original type is in this way preserved; but not strictly preserved, as the weeding-out process is carelessly--I had almost said stupidly--performed.

The thinning takes place in December, and at that season people who live in the vicinity of the park are startled each morning by the sound of firing, as at the covert side. The sub-ranger and his friends and underlings are enjoying their big annual shoot. And there is no reason why they should not have this sport, if it pleases them, and if by this means the object sought could be obtained. But it is not obtained, as anyone may see for himself; and it also seems a trifle ridiculous that any man can find sport in shooting birds accustomed to walk about among people's legs and feed out of little children's hands.

Once upon a time, in a distant country, I came with a companion to a small farmhouse. We were very much in want of a meal, but no person was about, and the larder was empty, and so we determined to kill and broil a chicken for ourselves. On our making certain chuckling noises, which domestic birds understand, a number of fowls scattered about near the place rushed up to us, expecting to be fed. We made choice of a very tall cockerel for our breakfast; so tall was this young bird on his long, bright yellow stilt-like shanks that he towered head and neck above his fellows. My companion, who was an American, had a revolver in his pocket, and pulling it out he fired five shots at the bird at a distance of about six yards, but failed to hit it. He was preparing to reload his weapon, when, to expedite matters, I picked up a stick and knocked the chicken over, and in less than fifty minutes' time we were picking his bones.

I doubt if the Hyde Park sportsmen will see anything very amusing in this story.

The mallard is an extremely handsome fowl, and it is pleasant to see such a bird in flocks, at home on the ornamental waters, and at the same time to learn that it is, in a sense, a wild bird, that in the keenness of its faculties, its power of flight, and nesting habits it differs greatly from its degenerate domestic relation. By day he will feed from any person's hand; in the evening he returns to his ancient wary habit, and will not suffer a person to approach him. He is active by night, particularly in the autumn, flying about the park and gardens in small flocks and feeding on the grass. It is a curious and delightful experience to be alone on a damp autumn night in Kensington Gardens. One is surrounded by London; its dull continuous murmur may be heard, and the glinting of distant lamps catches the eye through the trees; these fitful gleams and distant sounds but make the silence and darkness all the more deep and impressive. Suddenly the whistling of wings is heard, and the loud startled cry of a mallard, as the birds, vaguely seen, rush by overhead; the effect on the mind is wonderful--one has been transported as by a miracle into the midst of a wild and solitary nature.

Both by day and night there is much going to and fro between the Serpentine and the Round Pond, but each bird appears to be faithful to its _home_, and those that have been reared on the Round Pond breed in its vicinity on the west side of the gardens. Where their eggs are deposited is known to few. Strange as it may seem, they nest in the trees, in holes in the trunks of the large elms, in many cases at a height of thirty feet or more from the ground. Some of the breeding-trees are known, of others the secret has been well kept by the birds. Not a few ducks breed in Holland Park, and find it an exceedingly difficult matter to get their broods into the gardens. More than once the strange spectacle of a duck leading its newly-hatched young along the thronged pavements of Kensington High Street has been witnessed.

When the young have been hatched in a tree the parent bird takes them up in her beak and drops them one by one to the ground, and the fall does not appear to hurt them. Last year a duck bred in a tree broken off at the top near St. Gover's Well, in the gardens. One morning she appeared with four ducklings, and leaving them near the pond went back to the tree and in time returned with a second lot of four. Still she was not satisfied, but continued to go back to the tree and to fly round and round it with a great clamour. A keeper who had been watching her movements sent for a man with a ladder to have the tree-top examined. The man found the broken stem hollow at the top, and by thrusting his arm down shoulder-deep was able to reach the bottom of the cavity with his hand. One duckling was found in it and rescued, and its mother made happy. That she had succeeded in getting all the others out of so deep and narrow a shaft seemed very astonishing.

An extraordinary incident relating to these Kensington ducks was told to me by one of the keepers, who himself heard it by a very curious chance. One dark evening, after leaving the gardens, he got on to an omnibus near the Albert Hall to go to his home at Hammersmith. Two men who occupied the seat in front of him were talking about the gardens and the birds, and he listened. One of the men related that he once succeeded in taking a clutch of ducks' eggs from the gardens. He put them under a hen at his home in Hammersmith, and nine ducklings were hatched. They were healthy and strong and grew up into nine as fine ducks as he had ever seen. Such fine birds were they that he was loth to kill or part with them, and before he had made up his mind what to do he lost them in a very strange way. One morning he was in his back yard, where his birds were kept, when a crow appeared flying by at a considerable height in the air; instantly the ducks, with raised heads, ran together, then with a scream of terror sprang into the air and flew away, to be seen no more. Up till that moment they had never seen beyond the small back yard where they lived--it was their world--nor had any one of them ever attempted to use his wings.

Let us now return to the nobler bird, the subject of this chapter.

It would not, I imagine, be difficult for one who had the time to count the London crows; those I am accustomed to see number about twenty, and I should not be surprised to learn that as many as forty crows frequent inner London. But with the exception of two, or perhaps three pairs, they do not now breed in London, but have their nesting-haunts in woods west, north, and east of the metropolis. These breeders on the outskirts bring the young they succeed in rearing to the parks, from which they have themselves in some cases been expelled, and the tradition is thus kept up. Most of the birds appear to fly over London every day, paying long visits on their way to Regent's Park, Holland Park, the central parks, and Battersea Park. As their movements are very regular it would be possible to mark their various routes on a map of the metropolis.

Mr. W. H. Tuck, writing to me about the carrion crow, says: 'For many years, when living in Kensington, several pairs of crows going from N.E. to S.W. passed at daybreak over my house on their way to the Thames banks at Chelsea, and I could always time them within a minute or two.' These birds come on their way from the northern heights to the river at Chelsea; the crows that breed in the neighbourhood of Syon Park and Richmond fly over the central parks to Westminster, and then follow the river down to its mouth.

The persistency with which the carrion crow keeps to his nesting-place may be seen in the case of a pair that have bred in private grounds at Hillfield, Hampstead, for at least sixty years. Nor is it impossible to believe that the same birds have occupied the site for this long period, the crow being a long-lived creature. The venerable author of 'Festus,' who also has the secret of long life, might have been thinking of this very pair when, more than half a century ago, he wrote his spirited lyric:--

The crow! the crow! the great black crow! He lives for a hundred years and mo'; He lives till he dies, and he dies as slow As the morning mists down the hill that go. Go--go! you great black crow! But it's fine to live and die like a great black crow.

Many persons might be inclined to think that it must be better for the crow to have his nest a little way out of the hurly-burly, or at all events within easy reach of the country; for how, they might ask, can this large flesh-eating, voracious creature feed himself and rear a nest full of young with cormorant appetites in London?

Eliza Cook, whose now universally neglected works I admired as a boy, makes the bird say, in her 'Song of the Crow':--

I plunged my beak in the marbling cheek, I perched on the clammy brow; And a dainty treat was that fresh meat To the greedy carrion crow.

The unknown author of 'The Twa Corbies' was a better naturalist as well as a better poet when he wrote--

I'll pick out his bonny blue een.

But this relates to a time when the bodies of dead men, as well as of other large animals, were left lying promiscuously about; in these ultra-civilised days, when all dead things are quickly and decently interred, the greedy carrion crow has greatly modified his feeding habits. In London, as in most places, he takes whatever he finds on the table, and though not in principle a vegetarian, there is no doubt that he feeds largely on vegetable substances. Like the sparrow and other London birds, he has become with us a great bread-eater.

Mr. Kempshall, the superintendent at Clissold Park, relates a curious story of this civilised taste in the crow. The park for very many years was the home of a pair of these birds. Unfortunately, when this space was opened to the public, in 1889, the birds forsook it, and settled in some large trees on private grounds in the neighbourhood. These trees were cut down about three years ago, whereupon the birds returned to Clissold Park; but they have now again left it. One summer morning before the park was opened, when there were young crows in the nest, Mr. Kempshall observed one of the old birds laboriously making his way across the open ground towards the nesting-tree, laden with a strange-looking object. This was white and round and three times as big as an orange, and the crow, flying close to the ground, was obliged to alight at short intervals, whereupon he would drop his pack and take a rest. Curious to know what he was carrying, the superintendent made a sudden rush at the bird, at a moment when he had set his burden down, and succeeded in getting near enough to see that the white object was the round top part of a cottage loaf. But though the rush had been sudden and unexpected, and accompanied with a startling shout, the crow did not lose his head; striking his powerful beak, or _plunging_ it, as Eliza Cook would have said, into the mass, he flopped up and struggled resolutely on until he reached the nest, to be boisterously welcomed by his hungry family. They had a big meal, but perhaps grumbled a little at so much bread without any ghee.

Probably the London crows get most of their food from the river. Very early every morning, as we have seen, they wing their way to the Thames, and at all hours of the day, when not engaged in breeding, crows may be seen travelling up and down the river, usually in couples, from Barnes and Mortlake and higher up, down to the sea. They search the mud at low tide for dead fishes, garbage, bread, and vegetable matter left by the water. Even when the tide is at its full the birds are still able to pick up something to eat, as they have borrowed the gull's habit of dropping upon the water to pick up any floating object which may form part of their exceedingly varied dietary. It is amusing to see the carrion crow fishing up his dinner in this way, for he does not venture to fold his wings like the gull and examine and take up the morsel at leisure; he drops upon the water rather awkwardly, wetting his legs and belly, but keeps working his wings until he has secured the floating object, then rises heavily with it in his beak. Another curious habit of some London crows in the south-west district, is to alight, dove-like, on the roofs and chimney-stacks of tall houses.

In an article on this bird which appeared in the 'Fortnightly Review' for May 1895, I wrote: 'It sometimes greatly adds to our knowledge of any wild creature to see it tamed--not confined in any way, nor with its wings clipped, but free to exercise all its faculties and to come and go at will. Some species in this condition are very much more companionable than others, and probably none so readily fall into the domestic life as the various members of the crow family; for they are more intelligent and adaptive, and nearer to the mammalians in their mental character than most birds. It is therefore curious to find that the subject of this paper appears to be little known as a domestic bird, or pet. A caged crow, being next door, so to speak, to a dead and stuffed crow, does not interest me. Yet the crow strikes one as a bird with great possibilities as a pet: one would like to observe him freely associating with the larger unfeathered crows that have a different language, to learn by what means he communicates with them, to sound his depths of amusing devilry, and note the modulations of his voice; for he, too, like other corvines, is loquacious on occasions, and much given to soliloquy. He is also a musician, a fact which is referred to by Æsop, Yarrell, and other authorities, but they have given us no proper description of his song. A friend tells me that he once kept a crow which did not prove a very interesting pet. This was not strange in the circumstances. The bird was an old one, just knocked down with a charge of shot, when he was handed over in a dazed condition to my informant. He recovered from his wounds, but was always a very sedate bird. He had the run of a big old country house, and was one day observed in a crouching attitude pressed tightly into the angle formed by the wall and floor. He had discovered that the place was infested by mice, and was watching a crevice. The instant that a mouse put out a head the crow had him in his beak, and would kill him by striking him with lightning rapidity two or three times on the floor, then swallow him. From that time mouse-catching was this bird's sole occupation and amusement, and he went about the house in the silent and stealthy manner of a cat.

'I am anxious to get the history of a tame crow that never had his wing-feathers clipped, and did not begin the domestic life as an old bird with several pellets of lead in his body.'

Curiously enough, not long after this article appeared another bird-lover in London was asking the same question in another journal. This was Mr. Mandeville B. Phillips, of South Norwood, then private secretary to the late Archbishop of Canterbury. By accident he had become possessed of a carrion crow, sold to him as a young raven taken from a nest at Ely. This bird made so interesting a pet that its owner became desirous of hearing the experiences of others who had kept carrion crows. Mr. Phillips, in kindly giving me the history of his bird, says that at different times he has kept ravens, daws, jays, and magpies, but has never had so delightful a bird friend as the crow. It was a revelation to him to find what an interesting pet this species made. No other bird he had owned approached him in cleverness and in multiplicity of tricks and devices: he could give the cleverest jackdaw points and win easily. If his bird was an average specimen of the race, he wondered that the crow is not more popular as a pet. This bird was fond of his liberty, but would always come to his master when called, and roosted every night in an outhouse. Like the tame raven, and also like human beings of a primitive order of mind, he was excessively fond of practical jokes, and whenever he found the dog or cat asleep he would steal quietly up and administer a severe prod on the tail with his powerful beak. He would also fly into the kitchen when he saw the window open, to steal the spoons; but his chief delight was in a box of matches, which he would carry off to pick to pieces and scatter the matches all over the place. He was extremely jealous of a tame raven and a jackdaw that shared the house and garden with him, and which he chose to regard as rivals; but this was his only unhappiness. The appearance of his master dressed in 'blazers' always greatly affected him. It would, indeed, throw him into such a frenzy of terror that Mr. Phillips became careful not to exhibit himself in such bizarre raiment in the garden. My informant concludes, that he is not ashamed to say that he shed a few tears at the loss of this bird.

I may add that I received a large number of letters in answer to my article on the carrion crow, but none of my correspondents in this country had any knowledge of the bird as a pet. In several letters received from America--the States and Canada--long histories of the common crow of that region as a pet bird were sent to me.