Chapter 11

"We talk and think of birds as essentially musical and mimetic, or at least vocal and noisy creatures; and yet we seem to think that although they have an ear, they have no ears. Little or nothing is told us of the structure of a bird's ear. We are now too enlightened to believe in what we can't see; and ears that are never pricked, or cocked, or laid back,--that merely receive and learn, but don't express,--that are organs, not features, don't interest our philosophers now.

"If you blow gently on the feathers of the side of a bird's head, a little above and behind the corner of the beak, a little below and behind the eye, the parted feathers will show the listening place; a little hole with convolutions of delicate skin turning inwards, very much like what your own ear would be if you had none,--I mean, if all of it that lies above the level of the head had been removed, leaving no trace. No one who looks at the little hole could fail to see that it is an ear, highly organized--an ear for music; at least, I found it so among the finches I have examined; I know not if a simpler structure is evident in the ear of a rook or a peacock.

"The feathers are so planted round a bird's ears, that however ruffled or wet, they can't get in--and possibly they conduct sound. Birds have no need of ears with a movable cowl over them, to turn and twist for the catching of stray sounds, as foxes have, and hares, and other four-footed things; for a bird can turn his whole head so as to put his ear wherever he pleases in the twinkling of an eye; and he has too many resources, whatever bird he may be, of voice and gesture, to need any power of ear-cocking to welcome his friends, or ear-flattening to menace his foes.

"The long and the short of it is, that we may as well take the trouble first to look for, and then to look at, a bird's ear--having first made the bird like us and trust us so much, that he won't mind a human breath upon his cheek, but will let us see behind the veil, into the doorless corridor that lets music into the bird-soul."

154. Next; the physician (over whom, to get the letter out of him, I had to use the authority of a more than ordinarily imperious patient) says,--

"Now for the grebes lowering themselves in water, (which Lucy said I was to tell you about). The way in which they manage it, I believe to be this. Most birds have under their skins great air-passages which open into the lungs, and which, when the bird is moving quickly, and consequently devouring a great deal of air, do, to a certain extent, the work of supplementary lungs. They also lessen the bird's specific gravity, which must be of some help in flying. And in the gannet, which drops into the sea from a great height after fish, these air-bags lessen the shock on striking the water. Now the grebes (and all diving-birds) which can swim high up out of water when the air-cushions are full, and so feel very little the cold of the water beneath them, breathe out all spare air, and sink almost out of sight when they wish to be less conspicuous;--just as a balloon sinks when part of the gas is let out. And I have often watched the common divers and cormorants too, when frightened, swimming about with only head and neck out of water, and so looking more like snakes than birds.

"Then about the Dippers: they 'fly' to the bottom of a stream, using their wings, just as they would fly up into the air; and there is the same difficulty in flying to the bottom of the stream, and keeping there, as there would be in flying up into the air, and keeping there,--perhaps greater difficulty.

"They can never walk comfortably along the bottom of a river, as they could on the bank, though I know they are often talked of as doing it. They too, no doubt, empty their air-bags, to make going under water a little less difficult."

155. This most valuable letter, for once, leaves me a minute or two, disposed to ask a question which would need the skinning of a bird in a diagram to answer--about the "air-passages, which are a kind of supplementary lungs." Thinking better of it, and leaving the bird to breathe in its own way, I _do_ wish we could get this Dipper question settled,--for here we are all at sea--or at least at brook, again, about it: and although in a book I ought to have examined before--Mr. Robert Gray's 'Birds of the West of Scotland,' which contains a quantity of useful and amusing things, and some plates remarkable for the delicate and spirited action of birds in groups,--although, I say, this unusually well-gathered and well-written book has a nice little lithograph of two dippers, and says they are quite universally distributed in Scotland, and called 'Water Crows,' and in Gaelic 'Gobha dubh nan allt,' (which I'm sure must mean something nice, if one knew what,) and though it has a lively account of the bird's ways out of the water--says not a word of its ways _in_ it! except that "dippers everywhere delight in _deep_ linns and brawling rapids, where their interesting motions never fail to attract the angler and bird-student;" and this of their voices: "In early spring, the male birds may be seen perched on some moss-covered stone, trilling their fine clear notes;" and again: "I have stood within a few yards of one at the close of a blustering winter's day, and enjoyed its charming music unobserved. The performer was sitting on a stake jutting from a mill-pond in the midst of a cold and cheerless Forfarshire moor, yet he joyously warbled his evening hymn with a fullness which made me forget the surrounding sterility."

Forget it not, thou, good reader; but rather remember it in your own hymns, and your own prayers, that still--in Bonnie Scotland, and Old England--the voices, almost lost, of Brook, and Breeze, and Bird, may, by Love's help, be yet to their lovers audible. Ainsi soit il.

BRANTWOOD, 8_th July_, 1881.