Part 6
Observe, moreover, that this strange being is gifted with the proud prerogative of fearing nothing in this world. Little, but strong and intrepid, he braves all the tyrants of the air. He can despise, if need be, the pygargue and the condor: those huge unwieldy creatures will with great difficulty have put themselves in motion when he shall have already achieved a distance of ten leagues.
Oh, it is then that envy seizes us, when, amid the glowing azure of the Tropics, at incredible altitudes, almost imperceptible in the dim remoteness, we see him triumphantly sweeping past us--this black, solitary bird, alone in the waste of heaven: or, at the most, at a lower elevation, the snow-white sea-swallow crosses his flights in easy grace!
Why dost not thou take me upon thy pens, O king of the air, thou fearless and unwearied master of space, whose wondrously swift flight annihilates time? Who more than thou is raised above the mean fatalities of existence?
One thing, however, has astonished me: that, when contemplated from near at hand, the first of the winged kingdom should have nothing of that serenity which a free life promises. His eye is cruelly hard, severe, mobile, unquiet. His vexed attitude is that of some unhappy sentinel doomed, under pain of death, to keep watch over the infinity of ocean. He visibly exerts himself to see afar. And if his vision does not avail him, the doom is on his dark countenance; nature condemns him, he dies.
On looking at him closely, you perceive that he has no feet. Or at all events, feet which being palmate and exceedingly short, can neither walk nor perch. With a formidable beak, he has not the talons of a true eagle of the sea. A pseudo-eagle, and superior to the true in his daring as in his powers of flight, he has not, however, his strength, his invincible grasp. He strikes and slays: can he seize?
Thence arises his life of uncertainty and hazard--the life of a corsair and a pirate rather than of a mariner--and the fixed inquiry ever legible on his countenance: "Shall I feed? Shall I have wherewithal to nourish my little ones this evening?"
The immense and superb apparatus of his wings becomes on land a danger and an embarrassment. To raise himself he needs a strong wind and a lofty station, a promontory, a rock. Surprised on a sandy level, on the banks, the low reefs where he sometimes halts, the frigate-bird is defenceless; in vain he threatens, he strikes, for a blow from a stick will overcome him.
At sea, those vast wings, of such admirable utility in ascent, are ill-fitted for skimming the surface of the water. When wetted, they may over-weight and sink him. And thereupon, woe to the bird! He belongs to the fishes, he nourishes the mean tribes on which he had relied for his own behoof; the game eats the hunter, the ensnarer is ensnared.
And yet, what shall he do? His food lies in the waters. He is ever compelled to draw near them, to return to them, to skim incessantly the hateful and prolific sea which threatens to engulf him.
Thus, then, this being so well-armed, winged, superior to all others in power of flight and vision as in daring, leads but a trembling and precarious life. He would die of hunger had he not the industry to create for himself a purveyor, whom he cheats of his food. His ignoble resource, alas, is to attack a dull and timorous bird, the noddy, famous as a fisher. The frigate-bird, which is of no larger dimensions, pursues him, strikes him on the neck with his beak, and constrains him to yield up his prey. All these incidents transpire in the air; before the fish can fall, he catches it on its passage.
If this resource fail, he does not shrink from attacking man. "On landing at Ascension Island," says a traveller, "we were assailed by some frigate-birds. One tried to snatch a fish out of my very hand. Others alighted on the copper where the meat was being cooked to carry it off, without taking any notice of the sailors who were around it."
Dampier saw some of these birds, sick, aged, or crippled, perched upon the rocks which seemed their sanatorium, levying contributions upon the young noddies, their vassals, and nourishing themselves on the results of their fishing. But in the vigour of their prime they do not rest on earth; living like the clouds, constantly floating on their vast wings from one world to the other, patiently awaiting their fortune, and piercing the infinite heaven--the infinite waters--with implacable glance.
The lord of the winged race is he who does not rest. The chief of navigators is he who never reaches his _bourne_. Earth and sea are almost equally prohibited to him. He is for ever banished.
Let us envy nothing. No existence is really free here below, no career is sufficiently extensive, no power of flight sufficiently great, no wing can satisfy. The most powerful is but a temporary substitute. The soul waits, demands, and hopes for others:--
"Wings to soar above life: Wings to soar beyond death!"
[NOTE.--_The Frigate-Bird._ This interesting bird (_Tachypetes_) is allied to the cormorants, but differs from them in the possession of a forked tail, short feet, a curved beak, and extraordinary spread of wing. Its plumage is coloured of a rich purple black, but the beak is varied with vermilion red, and the throat with patches of white. It is an inhabitant of the Tropics, where it lives a predatory life, forcing the gannet and the gull to disgorge their prey, and retiring to breed in lonely uninhabited islands.
Of its voracity, Dr. Chamberlaine gives a curious illustration. When the fishermen are pursuing their vocation on the sand-banks in Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, the gulls, pelicans, and other sea-birds gather round in swarms, and as the loaded net is hauled ashore, pounce upon their struggling prey. But no sooner does this take place, than the frigate-birds attack them with such furious violence that they are glad to surrender their hard-earned booty to antagonists so formidable.
The lightness of his body, his short tarsi, his enormous spread of wing, together with his long, slender, and forked tail, all combine to give this bird a superiority over his tribe, not only in length and swiftness of flight, but also in the capability of maintaining himself on extended pinions in his aerial realm, where, at times, he will soar so high that his figure can scarce be discerned by the spectator in this nether world.--_Translator._]
THE SHORES.
DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES.
I have frequently observed, in my days of sadness, a being sadder still, which Melancholy might have chosen for its symbol: I mean, the Dreamer of the Marshes, the meditative bird that, in all seasons, standing solitarily before the dull waters, seems, along with his image, to plunge in their mirror his monotonous thought.
His noble ebon-black crest, his pearl-gray mantle--this semi-royal mourning contrasts with his puny body and transparent leanness. When flying, the poor heron displays but a couple of wings; low as is the elevation to which he rises, there is no longer any question of his body--he becomes invisible. An animal truly aerial, to bear so light a frame, the heron has enough, nay, he has a foot too many; he folds under his wing the other; and nearly always his lame figure is thus defined against the sky in a fantastical hieroglyph.
Whoever has lived in history, in the study of fallen races and empires, is tempted to see herein an image of decay. Yonder bird is a great ruined lord, a dethroned king, or I am much mistaken. No creature issues from Nature's hands in so miserable a condition. Therefore I ventured to interrogate this dreamer, and I said to him from a distance the following words, which his most delicate hearing caught exactly:--"My fisher-friend, wouldst thou oblige me by explaining (without abandoning thy present position), why, always so melancholy, thou seemest doubly melancholy to-day? Hath thy prey failed thee? Have the too subtle fish deceived thine eyes? Does the mocking frog defy thee from the bottom of the waters?"
"No; neither fish nor frogs have made sport of the heron. But the heron laughs at himself, despises himself, when he remembers the glory of his noble race, and the bird of the olden times.
"Thou wouldst know wherefore I dream? Ask the Indian chief of the Cherokees, or the Iowas, why for long days he leans his head upon his hand, marking on the tree before him an object which was never there?
"The earth was our empire, the realm of the aquatic birds in the Transitional age when, young and fresh, she emerged from the waters. An era of strife, of battle, but of abundant subsistence. Not a heron then but earned his life. There was need neither to attack nor pursue; the prey hunted the hunter; it whistled, or it croaked on every side. Millions of creatures of undefined natures, bird-frogs, winged fish, infested the uncertain limits of the two elements. What would ye have done, ye feeble mortals, the latest-born of the world? The Bird prepared earth for ye. Colossal encounters were waged against the enormous monster-births of the ooze; the son of air, the bird, attaining the dimensions of an Anak, shrunk not from battle with the giant. If your ungrateful histories have not traced these events, God's grand record narrates them in the depths of the earth, where she deposits the conquered and the conquerors, the monsters exterminated by us, and we who have exterminated them.
"Your lying myths make us contemporaries of a human Hercules. What had his club availed against the plesiosaurus? Who would have met, face to face, the horrible leviathan? The capacity of flight was absolutely needed, the strong intrepid wing which from the loftiest height bore downwards the Herculean bird, the epiornis, an eagle twenty feet in stature, and fifty feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, the implacable hunter, who, lord of three elements, in the air, in the water, and in the deep slime, pursued the dragon with ceaseless hostility.
"Man had perished a hundred times. Through our agency man became possible on a pacified earth. But who will be astonished that these awful wars, which lasted for myriads of years, spent the conquerors, wearied the winged Hercules, transformed him into a feeble Perseus, a pale and lustreless memory of our heroic times?
"Lowered in strength and stature, but not in heart, famished by our very victory, by the disappearance of evil races, by the division of the elements which held our prey concealed at the bottom of the waters, we in our turn were hunted upon the earth, in the forests and the marsh, by those new-comers who, without our help, had never been. The malice and dexterity of the woodman were fatal to our nests. Like a coward, in the thick of the branches which impede flight and shackle combat, he laid his hand on our young ones. A new war, and a less fortunate one, this, which Homer calls the War of the Pigmies and the Cranes. The lofty intelligence of the cranes, their truly military tactics, have not prevented man their enemy from gaining the advantage by a thousand execrable arts. Time was on his side, and earth, and nature: she moves forward, drying up the earth, exhausting the marshes, narrowing the undefined region where we reigned. It will be with us, in the end, as with the beaver. Many species perish: another century, perhaps, and the heron _will have_ lived."
The story is too true. Except those species which have taken their side, have abandoned earth, have given themselves up frankly and unreservedly to the liquid element; except the divers, the cormorant, the wise pelican, and a few others, the aquatic tribes seem in a state of decay. Restlessness and sobriety maintain them still. It is this persistent anxiety which has gifted the pelican with a peculiar organ, hollowing for her under her distended beak a movable reservoir, a living sign of economy and of attentive foresight.
Others, skilful voyagers, like the swan, live by constantly changing their abode. But the swan herself, which, though uneatable, is trained by man on account of her beauty and her grace--the swan, formerly so common in Italy, and to which Virgil so constantly refers, is now very rare there. In vain the traveller would seek for those snow-white flotillas which covered with their sails the waters of the Mincio, the marshes of Mantua; which mourned for Phaëton in despite of his sisters, or in their sublime flight, pursuing the stars with harmonious song, repeated to them the name of Varus.[20]
That song, of which all antiquity speaks, is it a fable? These organs of singing, which are so largely developed in the swan, were they always useless? Did they never disport themselves in happy freedom when enjoying a more genial atmosphere, and spending the greater portion of the year in the mild climates of Greece and Italy? One might be tempted to believe it. The swan, driven back to the north, where his amours secure mystery and repose, has sacrificed his song, has gained the accent of barbarism, or become voiceless. The muse is dead; the bird has survived.
Gregarious, disciplined, full of tactic and resources, the crane, the superior type of intelligence among these species, might contrive, one would fancy, to prosper, and to maintain herself everywhere in her ancient royalty. She has lost two kingdoms, however: France, where she now only appears as a bird of passage; England, where she rarely ventures to deposit her eggs.
The heron, in the days of Aristotle, was full of industry and sagacity. The ancients consulted him in reference to fine weather or tempest, as one of the gravest of augurs. Fallen in the mediæval days, but preserving his beauty, his heavenward flight, he was still a prince, a feudal bird; kings esteemed it kingly sport to hunt him, and considered him a meet quarry for the noble falcon. And so keenly was he hunted, that already, in the reign of Francis I., he had grown rare: that monarch lodged him near his own palace at Fontainebleau, and established there some heronries. Two or three centuries pass, and Buffon can still believe that there are no provinces in France where heronries could not be found. In our own days, Toussenel knows of but one in all the country--at least in its northern districts, in Champagne: a wood between Rheims and Epernay conceals the last asylum where the poor lonely bird still dares to hide his loves.
Lonely! In that lies his condemnation. Less gregarious than the crane, less domesticated than the stork, he seems to have grown harsh towards his progeny, towards the mate whom he loves. His brief rare fits of desire scarcely beguile him for a day from his melancholy. He cares little for life. In captivity he often refuses nourishment, and pines away without complaint and without regret.
The aquatic birds, creatures of great experience, for the most part reflective and learned in two elements, were, at their palmiest epoch, more advanced than many others. They well deserved the care of man. All of them possessed merits of diverse originality. The social instinct of the cranes, and their various imitative talent, rendered them amusing and agreeable. The joviality of the pelican, and his joyous humour; the tenderness of the goose, and his strong faculty of attachment; and, finally, the good disposition of the storks, their piety towards their aged parents, confirmed by so many witnesses, formed between this world and our own firm ties of sympathy, which human levity ought not barbarously to have rent asunder.
[NOTE.--_Heronries in England._ The heron, though rare in England, is certainly not so scarce as he seems to be in France, perhaps because it is against the laws of sport to hunt him. In some districts the man who shot a heron would be regarded with as much scorn as if he had killed a fox. He is a very rapacious bird, and it is asserted that, on an average, he will destroy daily half a hundred small roach and dace.
There is a fine heronry at Cobham, near Gravesend, in Kent, the seat of the Earl of Darnley. Another, in Great Sowdens Wood, on the Rye road, one mile from Udimere, in Sussex, contains fully four hundred nests. That at Parham, the Hon. R. Curzon's beautiful seat has quite a history.
The original birds were brought from Wales to Penshurst, by the Earl of Leicester's steward, in the reign of James I. Thence, some two centuries later, they migrated to Michel Grove, at Angmering. It may be about twenty years since that the Duke of Norfolk caused two or three trees to be felled near their retreat, and the offended birds immediately commenced their migrations, and, in the course of three seasons, all assembled in Parham Woods. Here, in the thick shelter of pine and spruce-fir, are now about fifty-seven nests. (See Knox's "Ornithological Rambles in Kent and Sussex.")--_Translator._]
THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA.
WILSON, THE ORNITHOLOGIST.
The decay of the heron is less perceptible in America. He is not so frequently hunted. The solitudes are of vaster dimensions. He can still find, among his beloved marshes, gloomy and almost impenetrable forests. In these shadowy recesses he is more gregarious: ten or fifteen "domestic exiles" establish themselves in the same locality, or at but a short distance from each other. The complete obscurity which the huge cedars throw over the livid waters re-assures and rejoices them. Towards the summit of these trees they build with sticks a wide platform, which they cover with small branches: this is the residence of the family, and the shelter of their loves; there, the eggs are laid and hatched in quiet, the young are taught to fly, and all those paternal lessons are given which will perfect the young fisher. They have little cause to fear the intrusion of man into their peaceful retreats: these they find near the sea-shore, especially in North and South Carolina, in low swampy levels, the haunt of yellow fever. Such morasses--an ancient arm of the sea or a river, an old swamp left behind in the gradual recession of the waters--extend sometimes over a length of five or six miles, and a breadth of one mile. The entry is not very inviting: a barrier of trees confronts you, their trunks perfectly upright and stripped of branches, fifty or sixty feet high, and bare to the very summit, where they mingle and bring together their leafy arches of sombre green, so as to shed upon the waters an ominous twilight. What waters! A seething mass of leaves and débris, where the old stems rise pell-mell one upon another; the whole of a muddy yellow colour, coated on the surface with a green frothy moss. Advance, and the seemingly firm expanse is a quicksand, into which you plunge. A laurel-tree at each step intercepts you; you cannot pass without a painful struggle with their branches, with wrecks of trees, with laurels constantly springing up afresh. Rare gleams of light shoot athwart the darkness, and the silence of death prevails in these terrible regions. Except the melancholy notes of two or three small birds, which you catch at intervals, or the hoarse cry of the heron, all is dumb and desolate; but when the wind rises, from the summit of the trees comes the heron's moans and sighs. If the storm bursts, these great naked cedars, these tall "ammiral's masts," waver and clash together; the forest roars, cries, groans, and imitates with singular exactness the voices of wolves, and bears, and all the beasts of prey.
It was not then without astonishment that, about 1805, the heron, thus securely settled, saw a rare face, a man's, roaming under their cedars, and in the open swamp. One man alone was capable of visiting them in their haunts, a patient indefatigable traveller, no less courageous than peaceable--the friend and the admirer of birds, Alexander Wilson.
If these people had been acquainted with their visitor's character, far from feeling terrified at his appearance, they would undoubtedly have gone forth to meet him, and, with clapping of wings and loud cries, have given him an amicable salute, a fraternal ovation.
In those terrible years when man waged against man the most destructive war that had ever been known, there lived in Scotland a man of peace. A poor Paisley weaver,[21] in his damp dull lodging, he dreamed of nature, of the infinite liberty of the woods, and, above all, of the winged life. A cripple, and condemned to inactivity, his very bondage inspired him with an ecstatic love of light and flight. If he did not take to himself wings, it was because that sublime gift is, upon earth, only the dream and hope of another world.
At first he attempted to gratify his love of birds by the purchase of those illustrated works which pretend to represent them. Clumsy caricatures, which convey but a ridiculous idea of their form, and none at all of their movement; and what _is_ the bird deprived of grace and motion? These did not suffice. He took a decisive resolution: to abandon everything, his trade, his country. A new Robinson Crusoe, he was willing, by a voluntary shipwreck, to exile himself to the solitudes of America; where he might see with his own eyes, observe, describe, and paint. He then remembered one little fact: that he neither knew how to draw, to paint, or to write. But this strong and patient man, whom no difficulties could discourage, soon learned to write, and to write an excellent style. A good writer, a minutely accurate artist, with a delicate and certain hand, he seemed, under the guidance of Nature, his mother and mistress, less to learn than to remember.
Provided with these weapons, he plunges into the desert, the forest, and the pestiferous savannahs; becomes the friends of buffaloes and the guest of bears; lives upon wild fruits, under the splendid ceiling of heaven. Wherever he chances to observe a rare bird, he halts, encamps, and is "at home." What, indeed, is to there hurry him onward? He has no house to recall him, and neither wife nor child awaits him. He has a family, it is true: that great family which he observes and describes. And friends, he has _them_, too: those which have not yet learned to mistrust man, and which perch upon his tree, and chatter with him.
And, O birds, you are right; you have there a truly loyal friend, who will secure you many others, who will teach men to understand you, being himself as a bird in thought and heart. One day, perhaps, the traveller, penetrating into your solitudes, and seeing some of you fluttering and sparkling in the sun, will be tempted with the hope of spoil, but will bethink himself of Wilson. Why kill the friends of Wilson? And when this name flashes on his memory, he will lower his gun.
I do not see, let me add, why we should extend to infinity our massacre of birds, or, at least, of these species which are represented in our museums, or in the museums painted by Wilson, and his disciple Audubon, whose truly royal book, exhibiting both race, and the egg, the nest, the forest, the very landscape, is a rivalry with nature.