Part 20
The kingfisher is by far the most brilliantly coloured bird in the British Islands; and those who see it living and moving with the sunlight on it can form an idea of the wonderful lustre of many tropical species, which certainly cannot be done by gazing on the labelled pellets of dead and dimmed feathers, called ‘specimens,’ in cabinets and museums. Unhappily, this rare splendour of the kingfisher, which gives it value, has served only to draw destruction upon it. As Yarrell long ago said, it is persecuted chiefly because of its beauty, and the desire to possess a stuffed specimen in a glass case. It is found in suitable localities throughout Great Britain where it has not been exterminated to gratify the vile taste that prefers a mummy to a living creature. In Ireland it is rare and local as a breeding species, but as an autumn and winter visitor is found throughout the country. It frequents streams and rivers, and the margins of lakes, and, more rarely, the seaside. It is a solitary bird, and, like the dipper, restricts itself to one part of the stream where it gets its food. Day after day it returns to the same perch, where it sits watching the surface, silent and immovable as a heron. It looks out for its prey both when perched and when flying at a height of a few feet above the surface, and often hovers motionless for a few moments before darting down into the water. With the minnow it captures held crossways in the beak it flies to a perch, and, after beating it against the branch or stone, swallows it, head first, sometimes tossing it in the air and catching it as it falls. It also preys on aquatic insects and small crustaceans. The pairing-time is early, and in February or March the birds make choice of a breeding place, usually near their fishing-ground, but sometimes at a distance of a mile or more from the water. A hole is dug in a bank to a depth of from one to three or four feet; but sometimes the birds find a hole suited to their purpose, or a cavity under the roots of a tree growing on an overhanging bank, which they occupy. The hole made by the birds has an upward slope, and ends in a chamber about six inches in diameter. Here is formed the nest, of the strangest material used by any nest-making bird. The kingfisher, like the owl and cuckoo and many other species, casts up the indigestible portions of its food--the minute bones of minnows in this case--in the form of small pellets. The pellets are thrown up in the nest-chamber, and, when broken up and pressed down by the sitting-bird, are shaped into a cuplike nest. The eggs are six to eight in number, pure white and translucent, and globular in form.
Probably the kingfisher pairs for life, as the same breeding-hole is used year after year, although the two birds are not seen together out of the breeding season.
The cry is a shrill but musical piping note, two or three times repeated, somewhat like the sandpiper’s cry.
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Two specimens of the belted kingfisher (_Ceryle alcyon_), an American species, have been obtained in Ireland.
Three other birds remain to be noticed in this place; they are members of three distinct families, and are amongst the most beautiful of the rare occasional visitors seen in our country:--
The roller (_Coracius garrula_), a jay-like bird, blue and chestnut-brown in colour. It breeds in Southern and Central Europe, and is known only as a rare straggler in the British Islands.
The bee-eater (_Merops apiaster_)--A good many examples of this elegant and richly coloured bird have been obtained in England. It is an abundant species in Southern Europe, where it breeds in colonies in sandbanks, like our sand-martin.
The hoopoe (_Upupa epops_).--This species has some claim to a place among British birds, as it is an annual visitor to our country, although in small numbers. It is a singular and beautiful bird, and it is sad to think that, but for the persecution it has encountered year after year, it would most probably have established itself as a regular breeding species in the southern counties of England.
Cuckoo.
Cuculus canorus.
Upper parts bluish ash, darker on the wings, lighter on the neck and breast; under parts whitish with transverse dusky streaks; quills barred on the inner webs with oval white spots; tail-feathers blackish, tipped and spotted with white; beak dusky, edged with yellow; orbits and inside of mouth orange yellow; iris and feet yellow. _Young_: ash-brown barred with reddish brown; tips of feathers white; a white spot on the back of the head. Length, thirteen and a half inches.
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There are many cuckoos in the world, and in some countries it would be possible to see three or four, or even half a dozen, distinct species in the course of a single day. We have but one, and have made much of it. ‘Perhaps no bird,’ says Yarrell, ‘has attracted so much attention, while of none have more idle tales been told.’ And he might have added, that of no other bird so much remains to be known. Our cuckoo interests us in two distinct ways: he charms us, and he affects the mind with his strangeness. He is a visitor of the early spring, with a far-reaching, yet soft and musical, voice, full of beautiful associations, prophetic of the flowery season. To quote Sir Philip Sidney’s words, applying them to a feathered instead of to a human troubadour: ‘He cometh to you with a tale to hold children from their play and old men from the chimney-corner.’ Seen, this melodist has the bold figure, rough, feathered legs, and barred plumage of a hawk. This fierce, predacious aspect is deceptive: he is a timid bird, with the climbing feet of the woodpecker and wryneck. Strangest of all, the female has the habit of placing her eggs in other birds’ nests, forgetting her motherhood, a proceeding which, being contrary to nature’s use, seems unnatural. It reads like a tale from the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ in which we sometimes encounter human beings, good, or bad, or merely fantastic, who wander about the world disguised as birds. Only when we see and handle the cuckoo’s egg placed in the hedge-sparrow’s, or pipit’s, or wagtail’s nest, when we see the large hawk-like young cuckoo being fed and tenderly cared for by its diminutive foster-parent, do we realise the extraordinary nature of such an instinct. In spite of this ‘naughtiness’ of the cuckoo, to speak of it in human terms, it is to all a favourite, ‘the darling of the year,’ and from the days when the oldest known English lyric was written--
Summer is icumen in, Loud sing cuckoo,
to the present time the poets have found inspiration in his fluting call; and musicians, too, owing to that unique quality of his voice which makes it imitable and harmonious with human music, vocal and instrumental.
The cuckoo does not usually arrive in this country before the middle of April, but he is sometimes two, and even three weeks earlier. The males arrive first, and it is they that utter the well-known double call that gives the bird its name. The cry of the female, a curious prolonged bubbling sound, is heard less frequently.
One of the strangest facts in the strange history of this bird is that its egg is not laid in the nest in which it is found, but is carried by the cuckoo in her bill and placed there. It is very small for so large a bird, although much larger, in most cases, than the eggs it is placed with, as its favourite nests in this country are all of small birds--the hedge-sparrow, reed-warbler, pied wagtail, and meadow-pipit. The eggs are very variable, being dull greenish or dull reddish grey, with spots and mottlings of a deeper shade. In some instances the cuckoo’s egg resembles in colour the eggs it is placed with, and it is thought by some naturalists that the female cuckoo invariably deposits her eggs in the nests of one species. As a rule, only one egg is laid in a nest, and a few days after the eggs are hatched the young cuckoo gets rid of his foster-brothers by getting them on to his back, which is broad and hollow, and throwing them over the side of the nest. If any unhatched eggs remain in the nest, he gets rid of them in the same way.
The food of the cuckoo is exclusively insectivorous, and consists in large part of hairy caterpillars, which most birds refuse to touch. The indigestible portions of the food he swallows are cast up in small pellets.
By August the old birds take their departure; the young migrate one to two months later.
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No fewer than three exotic cuckoos have been placed on the list of British birds. Two of these are American species: the yellow-billed cuckoo (_Coccyzus americanus_) and the black-billed cuckoo (_C. erythrophthalmus_). The third is the great spotted cuckoo (_Coccystes glandarius_), an African species, which visits Spain in summer, and, like our bird, is parasitical, but has the habit of depositing its eggs in the nests of various species of the crow family.
Barn-Owl.
Strix flammea.
Beak yellowish white; upper parts light tawny yellow minutely variegated with brown, grey, and white; face and lower plumage white, the feathers of the margin tipped with brown. Length, fourteen inches.
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The barn-owl is one of the very few species that have almost a world-wide range. It is resident throughout the British Islands, and inhabits the greater part of Europe; it extends to Africa, including Madagascar; to India and America, and to the Malaysian, Australian, and Polynesian regions; and is found in islands so widely separated and far removed from the mainland as the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, and Cape de Verde. The short-eared owl has a distribution just as wide, or even wider; but that bird, wherever found, is of a wandering habit, making his home and breeding-place wherever food is abundant, and staying not where it fails him. His action resembles, only on a vaster scale, that of the nomads of the human race, who break up their camp and move away from the district that no longer affords pasture to their cattle. Thus, in the case of this species, the vagrant habit may be held to account for so extensive a range. But the barn-owl’s universality cannot be accounted for in the same way, since he is, in most countries, a stay-at-home bird, and spends his whole life, from year’s end to year’s end, in the same spot. We can only conjecture that at some former and very remote period in the history of his species he, too, had a vagrant disposition; or else that he is a very ancient bird on the earth, and has had unlimited time to get so widely dispersed; also, that the barn-owl is one of those rare types that can exist unaltered in a great variety of conditions. One of our domestic birds, the goose, affords an instance of the unchangeableness of some types in all regions of the globe; but the goose has been carried everywhere by adventurous white men, while the barn-owl, by means unknown to us, has distributed himself over the earth.
Another general remark about this most strange and fascinating fowl may be made in this place. The barn-owl, being so widely distributed, and in many countries the most common species, and being, furthermore, the only member of its order that attaches itself by preference to human habitations, and is a dweller in towns as well as in rural districts, is probably the chief inspirer and object of the innumerable ancient owl superstitions which still flourish in all countries among the ignorant. His blood-curdling voice, his whiteness, and extraordinary figure, and, when viewed by day on his perch in some dim interior, his luminous eyes and great round face, and wonderful intimidating gestures and motions, must powerfully affect the primitive mind, for in that low intellectual state whatever is strange is regarded as supernatural.
Before sitting down to write this little history I went out into the woods, and was so fortunate as to hear three owls calling with unearthly shrieks to one another from some large fir-trees under which I was standing, and, listening to them, it struck me as only natural that in so many regions of the earth this bird should have been, and should still be, regarded as an evil being, a prophet of disaster and death.
The barn-owl takes up his abode by preference in a building of some kind--an old ruin, a loft in a barn or an outhouse; but above most sites he prefers an ivyclad church-tower, on which account he has been called the church-owl. He also inhabits caves and holes in cliffs, and hollow trees in woods. He spends the daylight hours, standing upright and motionless, dozing on his perch; and, where he is persecuted, he does not stir abroad until dark. When he is not molested he leaves his hiding-place before sunset, and is so little suspicious of man as to appear like a domestic bird in his presence. He preys on mice, rats, moles, insects, and even fish, which he has been observed to take in his claws from lakes and ponds. The indigestible portions of the small animals he swallows--the fur, feathers, bones, wing-cases, and scales--are disgorged in compact round pellets about the size of a cob-nut; and from an examination of a vast number of such pellets, it would appear that about nine-tenths of the food of this owl consists of mice.
This fact is now so generally known that the owl, from being one of the most persecuted of birds, is becoming a general favourite; and farmers who formerly shot it, and nailed it, with outspread wings, to their barn-doors, in order that all might see and admire their zeal in ridding the earth of so misshapen a pest, are now only anxious to have the ‘feathered cats’ living in their barns again.
The owl makes no nest, and lays from two to six eggs, which are white and nearly round. It has the curious habit of laying two or three eggs, and, long after incubation has begun, laying others, and then others again, so that young of different ages and eggs not yet near hatching may be found in the nest together. The young make a curious snoring noise, which is their hunger cry; and it has been said that this cry is also occasionally uttered by the old bird on the wing.
Long-eared Owl.
Asio otus.
Beak blackish; eyes orange-yellow; upper parts buff, finely mottled with brown and grey, and streaked with dark brown, especially on the ear-tufts; facial disk buff, with a greyish black margin and outer rim; under parts warm buff and grey, with blackish streaks and minute transverse bars. Length, fifteen inches.
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The long-eared owl may be described as a bird of beautiful plumage. The hues of the upper parts--various shades of yellow, buff, and brown, harmoniously disposed--and something, too, in the indeterminate pattern, remind us of the colouring of some of the very handsome cats. This cat-like colouring, long tufts of ear-like feathers, and large, round, fiery, yellow eyes, give the bird a singular and uncanny appearance. As a vocalist he is less interesting than the two other most common British species--the white owl, with its sepulchral shriek, and the tawny owl, with its mellow hoot--that mysterious sound of the deep woods at eventide. The commonest note of the present species is a mewing cry, heard when the birds begin to stir from their hiding-places before going out to forage. It also emits at times a short, barking cry.
The long-eared owl appears to be more gregarious than other species, except, perhaps, the short-eared owl. Mr. Abel Chapman writes: ‘A peculiarity of the habits of these owls after the breeding-season deserves a remark. As soon as the young were fledged the whole of the owls associated together, perhaps three or four broods, old and young, in a single family, and chose a thick black Scotch fir for their abode. Here they all passed the day. To this particular tree the whole of the owl-life of these woods resorted regularly at dawn, and in it slept away the hours of daylight, hidden amongst the deep evergreen recesses. At the particular tree of their choice (it varied in different years) the owls could invariably be interviewed during the summer and autumn, though to a casual eye it was difficult, amidst the deep shadows of the foliage, to distinguish their slim forms, pressed closely against the brown branches of the pine. Towards dusk their awakening was notified by the querulous cat-like cry; ten minutes later their silent forms appeared outside the wood, and, after a few rounds of preliminary gyrations, it was dark enough to commence operations in earnest.’
Field-mice and rats are its principal food; it also preys a good deal on insects, and kills more small birds than does the white owl. It is an early breeder, laying its eggs in the deserted nest of a crow, magpie, rook, or heron, or in a squirrel’s drey, or even making use of the slight platform-nest of the wood-pigeon. The eggs are four to six in number, nearly round in shape, and have smooth white shells.
Short-eared Owl.
Asio brachyotus.
Face whitish; beak black; iris yellow; tufts on the head small, composed of black feathers; eyes encircled by brownish black; upper parts dusky brown edged with yellow; under parts dull yellow streaked with brown. Length, fifteen inches.
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In its habits the short-eared owl offers a strong contrast to the species last described. It is a bird of the moors and fens, laying its eggs on the ground, and never, or very seldom, perches on trees. In appearance it is less owl-like and uncanny-looking than the long-eared owl, the colouring and markings being less rich, the head smaller, and the ear-tufts so small that at a distance of twenty-five yards they are scarcely visible. It is migratory in its habits, and as it arrives on the east coast at the same time as the woodcock, it is often called the woodcock-owl.
As a winter visitant it is found in most places in the British Islands, but it breeds with us only in Scotland and a few localities in the north of England. As I have said in the history of the barn-owl, the present species ranges over a large portion of the globe, and on the continent of America it is found from Greenland to the Straits of Magellan. It is not so nocturnal in its habits as the majority of owls, and may often be seen, an hour or two before sunset, beating over the rough ground like a hen harrier in search of prey. It feeds on small rodents of all kinds, and on birds. The eggs are three to five in number, and in some instances as many as seven or eight are laid, and are placed in a slight clearing among the herbage on marshy ground, or under the heather on a moor.
There is some variety in the language of this species: it hisses and makes a sharp clicking sound when angry, and has a loud, startling cry, a note repeated three or four times, like a ghostly laugh; and it also hoots, this performance sounding like the baying of a dog in the distance.
An interesting and curious fact in the history of this owl is that it is known to appear, often in considerable numbers, in any district where, owing to a great increase of field-mice or other small rodents, its favourite food is for the time abundant. This phenomenon has been observed in various parts of the world, in this country on several occasions; and during the late great plague of short-tailed voles in the south of Scotland (1891–92), large numbers of short-eared owls appeared, and remained to breed in the district. As long as the plague lasted they remained in the country, and were most prolific. When the voles disappeared the owls departed.
Tawny Owl.
Syrnium aluco.
Beak greyish yellow; iris bluish dusky; upper parts reddish brown, variously marked and spotted with dark brown, black, and grey; large white spots on the scapulars and wing-coverts; primaries and tail-feathers barred alternately with dark and reddish brown; under parts reddish white, with transverse brown bars and longitudinal dusky streaks; legs feathered to the claws. Length, sixteen inches.
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The tawny owl, named also brown owl and wood-owl, is by a little the largest of the four British species. In his colouring, as well as his woodland habits, he comes nearest to the long-eared owl, but he has no ear-tufts like that bird to add to his strangeness, nor is he in appearance so ghostly and grotesque as the white owl. This species alone of the British owls is unknown in Ireland. In England, Wales, and the south of Scotland it is to be met with in all well-wooded districts, and in some localities it is said to be the most common owl. But, unhappily, in many places where it was formerly common it has been extirpated by gamekeepers. Owls are not very social birds, and the tawny owl is the most unsocial of all. He inhabits the deep wood, where he lives solitary or with his mate, and he is said to be very jealous of the intrusion of another individual of his species into his hunting-grounds. His chief distinction is his powerful, clear voice: heard in the profound silence of the woods at eventide the sound is wonderfully impressive, and affects us with a sense of mystery. This may be due to imagination, or to some primitive faculty in us, since the feeling is strong only when we are alone. If we are in a merry company, then the wood-owl’s _too-whit, too-who_, may even seem to us ‘a merry note,’ as Shakespeare described it.
The tawny owl sometimes breeds, like the barn-owl, in ruins, outhouses, disused chimneys, and such places; but the usual site is a hollow tree, all the more liked if it is overgrown with ivy. Sometimes he takes possession of a deserted nest of a magpie or crow to breed in. The three or four eggs laid are white, and nearly round in shape.
The tawny owl is strictly nocturnal in habits, and preys on mice, rats, moles, young rabbits, squirrels, and birds; and he also, like most owls, occasionally takes fish.
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Besides the species described, no fewer than seven others have been included in books on British birds, and if these seven were not rare accidental visitors to our island we should indeed be rich in owls. It will be sufficient to give their names:--
Snowy owl (_Nyctea scandiaca_). European hawk-owl (_Surnia ulula_). American hawk-owl (_Surnia funeria_). Tengmalm’s owl (_Nyctala tengmalmi_). Scops owl (_Scops giu_). Eagle owl (_Bubo ignavus_). Little owl (_Athene noctua_).
It is possible that the last species may one day come to be ranked as a British bird, like the pheasant and red-legged partridge, as several attempts have been made to introduce it into this country, first by Waterton, in 1843; and, in recent years, by Mr. W. H. St. Quintin in Yorkshire, and Mr. Meade-Waldo in Hampshire.
Hen Harrier.
Circus cyaneus.
Upper parts of adult male bluish grey; lower parts white; beak black; irides reddish brown; legs and feet yellow; claws black. _Female_: upper parts reddish brown; under parts pale reddish yellow, with deep orange-brown, longitudinal streaks and spots. Length: male, eighteen inches; female, twenty inches.
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