Part 10

“In Sweden she builds in barns, and is called _ladu swala_, the barn swallow. Besides, in the warmer parts of Europe there are no chimneys to houses, except they are English-built. In those countries she constructs her nest in porches and gateways and galleries and open halls. Here and there a bird may affect some odd, peculiar place, as we have known a swallow build down the shaft of an old well through which chalk had been formerly drawn up for the purpose of manure; but in general with us this _Hirundo_ breeds in chimneys, and loves to haunt those stacks where there is a constant fire, no doubt for the sake of warmth. Not that it can subsist in the immediate shaft where there is a fire, but prefers one adjoining to that of the kitchen, and disregards the perpetual smoke of that funnel, as I have often observed with some degree of wonder.”

In the days before man began to build substantial houses for his habitation, the swallows can have nested only in caverns and under natural ledges in cliffs, so cannot have existed in anything like their present numbers. _Hirundo rustica_ is a common bird in India. During the winter it spreads itself over the plains, and may be seen, as in England, dashing through the air after tiny insects. In the East the gentle twittering of the birds as they propel themselves through the air sounds doubly sweet, since it recalls scenes in our distant island. The swallows which winter in India migrate to the Himalayas or Kashmir or Afghanistan, where they rear up their families.

But to-day I write of a more beautiful bird even than _Hirundo rustica_, of the most beautiful of the swallow kind, of a species on which Gilbert White could not have set eyes. Like the common species, the wire-tailed swallow (_Hirundo smithii_) is a glossy, steel-blue bird. The forehead, crown, and nape are chestnut, and all the lower plumage, including the chin, is white. In this last respect it differs considerably from the common swallow, which has the chin and throat chestnut, a black pectoral band, and the rest of the under parts pale reddish brown. In both species there is a white spot on each of the tail feathers, except the median pair. These white spots are very conspicuous when the bird sits with tail expanded.

The chief characteristic of _Hirundo smithii_ is the great development of the shafts of the outer tail feathers. In most swallows the shaft is elongated. In _H. rustica_ it extends 2½ inches beyond the other tail feathers. In the wire-tailed swallow the shaft of each of the outer tail feathers attains a length of seven inches, and is thus more than twice as long as the body of the bird. This swallow, indeed, looks as though two pieces of wire had been inserted into its tail; hence the popular name, which is far more appropriate than the scientific one. Jerdon called this species _H. filifera_, an excellent name, but among cabinet ornithologists the excellence or appropriateness of a bird’s name counts for nothing. Many years ago a member of the Smith family made the acquaintance of the bird, and it was named after him. This name being the oldest is the one by which we must call the bird until some bibliophile manages to unearth some yet earlier name.

The elongated shafts of the outer tail feathers are brittle and easily broken, so that it is the exception rather than the rule to see a bird with both the delicate filiferous appendages complete.

The habits of this swallow are similar to those of other species, except that it is probably not migratory. It is found all the year round in the plains of North-West India. It is rare in Lower Bengal, Assam, Upper Burma, and in South India. Although it occurs in the Madras Presidency, it is not often seen as far south as the city of Madras. Since water is always conducive to the presence of the small insects on which swallows feed, these birds usually seek their quarry in the vicinity of the liquid element, and naturally roost near their feeding grounds. This fondness for the neighbourhood of water doubtless gave origin to the once prevalent belief that some swallows did not leave England in the autumn, but remained behind and hibernated underwater. This idea is, of course, erroneous.

Wire-tailed swallows like to roost in considerable companies in the minarets of mosques or in other lofty towers. Unlike swifts, swallows frequently perch. Telegraph wires are a very favourite resting place. When these are not available the birds will settle on stones or tufts of grass.

As chimneys are scarce in the plains of India, the wire-tailed swallow has to look elsewhere for nesting sites. True to the traditions of its family, it almost invariably elects to build on some structure erected by man. Nine out of ten nests are built under the arches of low bridges or culverts, preferably those under which there is a little water lying. The nest projects from the arch like a little shelf. It resembles a deep saucer in shape, and is composed of a shell of mud, lined with feathers.

Wire-tailed swallows obtain the mud they use from the edge of water, and carry it in the bill in precisely the same way as the house martin does in England. One of the prettiest sights of a London suburb is to watch the house martins taking the materials for their nests from a muddy road, which they always contrive to do without soiling their white-feathered legs. Muddy roads are not common in India, hence wire-tailed swallows are not able to resort to them for nest-building materials.

The cup of the nest is usually fairly thick, especially at the place where the nest is attached to its foundation. The outside of the cup has a rugged appearance, and each of the projections which it displays corresponds to a mouthful of mud added to it by the bird. According to Mr. James Aitken, the birds occupy about four weeks in building the nest, “a narrow layer of mud being added each day and left to dry.”

When once a pair of wire-tailed swallows have made up their minds to nest in a certain spot they are not easily deterred from carrying out their intention. Mr. Aitken admits having on one occasion removed two eggs, out of a clutch of three, but the little mother sat on and hatched out the one egg that remained. A man of my acquaintance, who, although an egg collector, is not altogether devoid of the milk of kindness, always carries about with him one or two sparrow’s eggs which he exchanges for the birds’ eggs he wishes to add to his collection. One May day at Lahore this person came upon a wire-tailed swallow’s nest which contained one egg. This he removed, and substituted for it a sparrow’s egg. The owners of the nest either did not, or pretended not to, notice the exchange, and the hen laid two more eggs, so that when I visited the nest three days later I found that two legitimate eggs had been placed beside the spurious one. The incubating bird sat very tight, and allowed me to touch her, and had I wished to do so I could easily have caught her; such is the strength of the incubating instinct in some birds. The nest in question was built under a low arch, one end of which was blocked up. The only other occupants of the arch were a number of wasps. Birds seem to have little or no fear of wasps. Indeed, it is rather the wasps that fear the birds, which have a disagreeable habit of swallowing them, notwithstanding their sting and warning colouration! Three weeks later I paid another visit to the arch in question, and found that the swallow’s nest had been removed by some person or persons unknown, but under the same arch was another nest containing two eggs. It would seem that the plucky little birds, undaunted by the fate of their first nest and eggs, had quickly set to work to make good the loss.

XXVI WINTER VISITORS TO THE PUNJAB PLAINS

Six months ago we welcomed the birds that came to spend the summer with us—the tiny iridescent purple sunbird, the emerald bee-eater, its larger blue-tailed cousin, the golden oriole, the superb paradise flycatcher, the yellow-throated sparrow, the solemn night heron, and the noisy koel.

These have all built their nests, reared up their families (except, of course, the koels who made the crows do their nursemaids’ work) and departed. The sunbirds were the first, and the koels the last, to go. By August the former had all disappeared, but throughout the first half of October young koels were to be seen, perched in trees, flapping their wings, opening a great red mouth, and making creditable but ludicrous attempts at cawing.

Even the koels have now gone and will not reappear until the sun once again causes us human beings to wonder why we have come to this “Land of Regrets.”

The places left vacant by the summer visitors are being rapidly filled up. Lahore has for birds a winter as well as a summer season. The former is the more important of the two. So numerous are our winter bird visitors that it is not feasible to enumerate them in this place; we must be content with a glimpse at those which come in the greatest numbers and are, therefore, most likely to attract attention.

The earliest to arrive are the rosy starlings (_Pastor roseus_) or _Gulabi Mainas_, or _Tilyers_ as the natives call them. They are easy to recognise. They go about in great flocks. When a flock settles on a tree it is a point of etiquette for all the individuals that compose it to talk simultaneously. The head, crest, neck, throat, upper breast, wings, and tail are glossy black. The rest of the plumage is a beautiful rose colour in the adult cock and pale coffee colour in the hens and young cocks.

Rosy starlings arrive in Lahore as early as July. As they do not leave us until the end of April, and are supposed to nest in Asia Minor, it might be thought that they are the discoverers of some specially rapid method of nest-construction, egg-incubation, and bird-rearing. This is not so. The fact is they do not migrate simultaneously. The birds that were in Lahore in such numbers last April are not those which appeared in July. These latter probably migrated to Asia Minor in February.

It is only in the spring that the rosy starlings go about in very large flocks; these are the result of “packing” prior to migration. At other times the birds occur in nines and tens and associate with the ordinary mynas, feeding either on fruit or grain.

They appear to be the favourite game bird of the native of the Punjab. They are quite good to eat. A charge of small shot fired into a tree full of them brings down a dozen or more, so that a “crack” shot is easily able to secure a large bag and brag about it to his friends!

Several other species of starling visit the plains of the Punjab during the winter, arriving in November. These, like the familiar English starling, are all dressed in black, glossed with blue, green, and purple, and spotted with white. The species-making propensity of the professional ornithologist has led to the division of these into a number of species, although it requires an expert with an ornithological imagination to distinguish them from one another. They go about in flocks and, like the rosy starlings, all “talk at once.”

The winter visitors that appeal most to the sportsman are the game birds—the grey quail, the various species of duck, teal, geese, and snipe. The quail (_Coturnix communis_) are the first to appear. They arrive in Lahore late in August or early in September. It is the moon rather than the temperature that determines the date of their arrival. They migrate at night-time and naturally like to travel by moonlight. A few grey quail remain with us all the year round. These are probably birds that have been wounded by _shikaris_ and have not in consequence sufficient strength for the long migratory flight across the Himalayas. The fact that some quail remain in India throughout the hot weather, and are able to breed successfully, shows that their migration is a luxury rather than a necessity.

It is a universal rule that all migratory birds of the Northern Hemisphere breed in the more northerly of their two homes. This seems to indicate that they were formerly permanent residents in the latter. Geology tells us that thousands of years ago the climate of this earth suddenly became colder. The result was that the more northerly portions of it were rendered uninhabitable for birds during the winter—the frost killed insect life and the snow made vegetable food difficult to procure; hence, the birdfolk were confronted with the alternative of starving in winter or going south in search of food. They chose the latter alternative. So powerful is the “homing instinct”—the instinct that man has developed so wonderfully in the homer pigeon—that these migrants invariably returned in the summer to their old homes for breeding purposes.

The climate has again become milder, so that for many migratory birds migration is no longer necessary; nevertheless, they still perform the double journey every year. The force of habit is strong in birds. Those Australian finches which are imported into India, even when kept in aviaries in the Himalayas, nest in December and January as they did in Australia, where these are summer months.

The ducks and geese that visit the Punjab in winter are too numerous to be dealt with in this brief essay, which of necessity is not exhaustive. It merely deals with such of the winter visitors to the Punjab as are seen every day. Every winter Northern India is invaded by millions of grey-lag and barred-headed geese, and by hundreds of thousands of brahmany ducks, mallard, gadwall, teal, wigeon, pintails, shovellers and pochards. The other game birds which visit the Punjab in great numbers every winter are the jack and the common snipe.

The Indian redstart or firetail (_Ruticilla rufiventris_) is one of the most striking of our winter visitors. No one but a blind man can fail to notice the sprightly little bird with St. Vitus’ dance in its tail. The head, breast, neck, and back of the cock are grey or black according to the season of the year. Birds’ clothes wear out just as ours do. But every bird is his own tailor. When his clothes wear out, instead of resorting to the West-End tailor or the humble _darzi_, he grows a new coat. This process is technically known as the moult and occurs at the end of summer in most birds.

Each of the feathers composing the coat of the cock redstart is black with a grey margin. When the feathers are new only the grey edges show, the bird, therefore, looks grey; gradually the grey borders become worn away, so that the bird turns black. The remainder of the plumage of the cock, except the two middle tail feathers, is brick red. The hen is reddish brown where the cock is black or grey. As the bird hops about in the garden it looks very like a robin, but the moment it takes to its wings it becomes transformed, as if by magic, into a flash of red. The red of the tail and back is scarcely visible when the bird is not flying, for the wings cover the latter and the tail is closed like a fan; the red feathers all folding up underneath the middle brown ones which act as a cover. During flight the red tail feathers open out and the wings leave the red back exposed—hence the sudden transformation.

The redstart should be a favourite with Englishmen, because in habits and appearance it resembles the familiar robin of our country. The perverse Indian robin (_Thamnobia cambayensis_), it will be remembered, insists on wearing its patch of red, as Phil Robinson hath it, on the seat of its trousers.

The Indian redstart arrives towards the end of September. In the autumn of 1906, September 22nd was the date on which I first noticed a redstart in Lahore. In the following autumn I did not see one until September 27th. Bird-lovers of fixed abode in India would be rendering no small service to ornithology if they would record carefully, year after year, the dates on which they first observe each of our returning summer and winter visitors.

When the migrant wagtails arrive we feel that the hot weather is really over. Three species of wagtail are common in Lahore. One of these—the pied wagtail (_Motacilla maderaspatensis_)—is a permanent resident. The other two—the white wagtail (_Motacilla alba_) and the grey wagtail (_M. melanope_)—come to us only for the winter. The last is easily distinguished by its bright yellow lower plumage. The white and the pied wagtails are both clothed in black and white, but whereas the face and throat of the former are white, the whole head of the pied wagtail is black save for a white eye-brow.

Wagtails live almost entirely on the ground. Throughout the winter dozens of them are to be seen on the gymkhana cricket ground, sprinting after tiny insects, and stopping after each capture to indulge in a little tail wagging. All three species of wagtail feed exclusively on insects, so that the migration in this case, as in that of the quail and of many other birds, is obviously due to the force of habit.

Another winter visitor that cannot fail to attract attention is the white-eared bulbul (_Molpastes leucotis_), a bird loathed by the gardener on account of the damage it does to buds.

Two species of bulbul are abundant in Lahore: this one and the Punjab red-vented bulbul (_Molpastes intermedius_). The latter, like the poor, is always with us, while the former shakes the dust of Lahore off its feet and departs when the weather becomes hot. The permanent resident has a red patch under its tail and a black head and crest, while the migrant wears yellow under the tail and has white cheeks.

The family of birds of prey furnishes us with a large number of winter visitors. Those most likely to be seen in the neighbourhood of Lahore are the steppe eagle, the long-legged buzzard, the sparrow hawk, the peregrine falcon, the kestrel, and the merlin. It must not be thought that _all_ our Indian birds of prey are migrants. A number of species remain in the plains throughout the hot weather to vex the souls of their weaker brethren. Curiously enough, there is among the permanently resident raptores a counterpart, a nearly allied species—I might almost say a “double”—of nearly every migrant. The tawny eagle (_Aquila vindhiana_) and the steppe eagle (_A. bifasciata_) are so alike that some authorities are inclined to regard them as a single species. But the former lives in the plains all the year round and breeds in and about Lahore, while the steppe eagle goes to the hills in the hot weather to breed, and appears quite unable to endure heat. The one caught at Wazirabad in the cold weather of 1906-7 and confined in the local “Zoo” died comparatively early in the hot weather, whereas the tawny eagle, kept in the same cage, has all along flourished like the green bay tree. The shikra (_Astur badius_) and the sparrow hawk (_Accipiter nisus_), although ornithologists now place them in different genera, are so much alike that it is easy to mistake one for the other, yet the former is a permanent resident while the latter is a migrant. Similarly the peregrine falcon (_Falco peregrinus_) is a winter visitor to the plains of the Punjab, while its cousin the laggar (_Falco jugger_) is a permanent resident. In the same way the _Turumti_ or red-headed merlin abides with us all the year round, while the common merlin (_Aesalon regulus_) visits us only in winter.

Almost the only raptorial winter visitor that has not a cousin who lives in the plains throughout the year is the kestrel (_Tinnunculus alaudarius_), the bird known in England as the Windhover. This is perhaps the easiest to identify of all the birds of prey, on account of its habit of hovering on vibrating wings, like the pied kingfisher, high in the air, over a spot where it thinks that there is quarry in the shape of some small rodent. If the surmise be correct the kestrel drops like a stone and seizes its quarry in its talons; if it sees nothing it sweeps away with a few easy movements of its powerful wings and hovers elsewhere. The only other bird of prey that hovers like the kestrel is the black-winged kite (_Elanus caerulus_). This is mainly white and so cannot be confounded with the kestrel.

The explanation of the fact that one species of bird of prey leaves the plains in the hot weather, while a nearly related species remains, may perhaps be found in the nature of their food. Birds of prey are to a greater or lesser extent specialists; while quite ready to devour any small bird, reptile, or mammal which comes their way, they lay themselves out more especially to catch one particular species, and if that species migrates it follows that the bird that preys upon it will also migrate. Thus the peregrine falcon lays itself out to catch ducks and naturally goes with them to their breeding grounds, just as the hawker of cheap wares, who preys upon the _mem-sahib_, follows her to the hills in the summer.

In conclusion mention must be made of the _Corvi_ which visit us in winter. The arch-corvus, the grey-necked rascal (_Corvus splendens_), of course, abides with us all the year round. The raven, too, is to be seen at all times of the year, but is more abundant in the cold weather than in the hot. During the summer months we see comparatively few ravens; in the winter they are exceedingly numerous. Every evening towards sunset a long stream of them may be observed flying in a westerly direction to the common roosting place. There is a similar stream of crows that flies in a north-westerly direction. The rook (_Corvus frugilegus_) is a permanent resident of Kashmir and the North-Western Himalayas, but in mid-winter many individuals are driven by the cold into the Frontier Province and the Punjab; some come as far south as Lahore, where they consort with the crows. If the winter is a severe one large numbers of rooks come to Lahore, otherwise these birds are not very numerous. The same applies to the jackdaw (_Corvus monedula_), but he never comes in such numbers as the rook. There is in the octagonal bird house in the Lahore “Zoo” a compartment in which there is a “Happy Family” of ravens, rooks, and jackdaws, with an Australian crow-shrike and a Nicobar pigeon to keep them company. Thus every one who cannot already do so may learn to identify the various _Corvi_ which visit Lahore in the winter.

XXVII A KINGFISHER AND A TERN

Nearly every village in India has its pond which becomes filled with water during the monsoon and grows drier and drier during the winter and hot weather. The pond is usually a natural depression, sometimes enlarged and deepened by human agency. Occasionally a village is situated on the edge of a lake, or _jhil_, but such fortunate villages are few and far between; the average hamlet has to be content with a small tank. This morning I came upon such a tank, in which the water had become low, leaving a wide margin of mud between it and the artificially made bank. At one end a couple of people were squatting. _Mirabile dictu_, there was not a paddy bird to be seen, and the only feathered creature disporting itself along the edge was a grey wagtail. In mid pond four domestic ducks were feeding. A tern—the Indian river tern (_Sterna seena_)—was busy at the tank, flying gracefully over the water and dipping into it every few seconds. Judging from the frequency with which the bird dived, the water must have teemed with food, but there were no signs of fish rising, so that how the eye of the tern was able to penetrate the very muddy water is a mystery. However, the tern did manage to distinguish its quarry, for, although its movements were so rapid that I was not able to discover what it was catching, I could see distinctly that, when rising, it carried something tiny in its bill.