Part 6

It is the skylark, however, more than any other bird which so often upsets rules and calculations. Even people who do not observe the ways of birds must be struck by the numbers of larks which may be met with in the course of several midwinter walks, by the occasional outbreak of brief song, even, though snow be upon the wolds and a grey wind blow through the sere leaves of the oak-coppice or among the desolate hedgerows; must be the more struck by this, or by mention of it on the part of others, when they read of the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dead larks found on nights of storm or bitter frost, on the rocks below lighthouses, along the great lines of migration during the season of the vast inscrutable ebb or of the as vast and inscrutable vernal arrival. Incalculable hosts leave our shores every autumn, and along the bleak fen-lands, by wave-set lighthouses, on isles such as Ushant or Heligoland, thousands of wings flutter and fail; and the host passes on; and the sea-wave, the fierce gull, the shore-hawk, all the tribe of the owl, all the innumerable foes which prey upon the helpless, give scant grace to the weaklings and the baffled and weary. But why should all this immense congregation have listened to the ancestral cry, and from meadow and moor and the illimitable dim-sea of the fallowlands come singly and in flocks and in immense herds and in a cloudlike multitude, as sheep at the cry of the herdsman, as hounds at the long ululation of a horn, while thousands of their clan remain deaf to the mysterious Voice, the imperative silent mandate from oversea? Of these, again, countless numbers merely move to another region, and mayhap some cross the salt straits only to return; or as many, it may be, leave not at all the familiar solitudes, and at most show by cloudy flights and wild and fluctuating gyrations the heritage of blind instinct, which, if it cannot be satiated by far pilgrimage, must at least shake these troubled hearts with sudden inexplicable restlessness. It is calculated, again, that myriads of skylarks merely use our coasts as highways on their journey from the far south to the far north ... in this, too, exemplifying another strange law or manifestation of the mystery of migration, that the birds which move furthest north in their vernal arrival are those which penetrate furthest south when they turn again upon the autumnal wind of exile. Naturalists have proved, however, that countless hordes of skylarks actually arrive from Northern Europe to winter in our country. Are these birds moved by a different instinct from that which impels the majority of their kind? Have they, through generations following one another in the path of an accident, forgotten the sunlands of the common ancestral remembrance, and, having found Britain less snowbound and frostbound than the wastes of Esthonia and Pomerania, been content, when driven before the icy east wind, to fare no further than our bleak, and yet, save in the worst winters, relatively habitable inlands? Again, naturalists have observed a like movement hitherward in winter from Central Europe. There may be observed in the early spring as regular an emigration as, on a perhaps not vaster scale, an incalculable immigration. Apparently, most if not all of the myriads of skylarks which are undoubtedly with us throughout the winter are these immigrants from Northern and Central Europe. Those who come in February and in still greater numbers in March and April (and the later the arrivals the further north the goal, it is said) are the ‘strayed revellers’ from the South, the home-bred birds home again. In our remote Hebrides the nesting season is hardly over before the island-bred skylarks, so late in coming, are on the Great South Road once more. What with the habitual two and the not infrequent three broods raised in a single season, particularly in Southern England, South-West Scotland, and Ireland, and the enormous influx of aliens from Northern and Central Europe, our skylark population is at its highest, not, as most people might think, in May, or even about the season of the autumnal equinox, but at the beginning of November, when already the great tides of migration have ebbed. Another puzzling problem is the rhythmic regularity of the arrivals and departures of the incomers and the outgoers. For, while the latter will not take the high-road of the upper air till nightfall or at least until dusk, the former travel by day: and the goings and comings are so timed, or to observation appear so timed, that about four o’clock on a late October day the first cohort of the invaders may in the wide lonely desert overhead pass the first caravans of the exiles. In March, again, the two currents may once more meet: the home-bred birds are on their return, the aliens are on the wing for the hill-pastures and the vales and uplands of their native countries. This will account for how, say in the Hebrides, one observer will chronicle the departure of the skylarks before Summer-end, at the early close there of the nesting season, and how another, not less accurate, will note the presence weeks later of larks in apparently as great a number as ever. The islanders have gone, to seek the south: the newcomers from Scandinavia have taken their place. But here also, as elsewhere, the conditions of the weather will be more potent than even the summons of the spirit of migration: a severe frost will for a time clear a whole region of the tufted birdeens, a prolonged frost will drive them away from that region for the winter.

The Lark, then, so often apostrophised as the first voice of Spring, is by no means specifically the Herald of March. When we see his brown body breasting the air-waves of the March wind, it may not be the welcome migrant from the South we see, with greenness in his high aerial note and the smell of hay and wild roses in the o’ercome of his song, but a winter-exile from a far mountain-vale in Scandinavia or from the snowbound wastes of Courland or Westphalia.

The Woodlark, the Chiff-Chaff, and the rest, all are heralds of March. But as we identify certain birds with certain seasons and certain qualities ... as the Swallow with April, and the Cuckoo with May, and the Dove with peace ... so we have come to think of the Mavis and the Merle, but, above all, of the Skylark as the true heralds of March, the month when the Flutes of Pan sound from land’s end to land’s end, for all that tempest and flood, sleet and the polar blast and the bitter wind of the east, may ravage the coverts of the winged clans.

To write of all the birds who come back to us in the Spring, even so early as the front of March, would be, here, a mere catalogue, and then be incomplete. For the hidden places in the woods, in the meadows, in the hedgerows, on the moors, in the sandy dunes, in the hollowed rocks, on the ledges over green water and on the wind-scooped foreheads of cliffs and precipices; everywhere, from the heather-wilderness on the unsnowed hills to the tangled bent on the little windswept eyot set in the swing of the tides, the secret homes are waiting, or are already filled, and glad with that everlasting and unchanging business of the weaving anew of life which has the constancy of sunrise, the rhythmic certitude of day and night.

The spiritual secret of our delight in the joyousness of the lark’s song, or in that of mavis or merle, is because the swift music is a rapture transcending human utterance. There is not less joy in the screech of the jay, in the hoarse cry of the cormorant, in the scream of the gannet poised like a snowflake two thousand feet above the turbulent surge of blue and white, or green and grey, to its vision but a vast obscurity of calm filled with phantom life, a calm moveless seen from that great height, wrinkled only with perplexing interplay of wave and shadow. These have their joy, and to the open ear _are_ joy; not less than the merle singing among wet lilac, the mavis calling from the swaying poplar, the lark flinging the largesse of his golden music along the high devious azure roads. Can one doubt that this is so ... that, listening with the inward ear, we must hold as dear the wail of the curlew, the mournful cry of the lapwing, when on the hill-slope or in the wild grass these call rejoicingly in life and love and the mute ecstasy of implicit duty.

As long, however, as we impose our own needs and our own desires on the indifferent tribes of the earth and air, so long shall we take this or that comrade of the elements and say it is the voice of Peace, or War, or Love, or Joy. March, we say, is the month of gladness. A new spirit is awake, is abroad. The thrush and the blackbird are _our_ clarions of rejoicing. The lark, supremely, is _our_ lyric of joy.

Joy, the poet tells us, is the Mother of Spring, and of Joy has it not been said that there is no more ancient God? What fitter symbol for this divine uplift of the year than this bird whose ecstasy in song makes the very word Spring an intoxication in our ears? We have a Gaelic legend that the first word of God spoken to the world became a lark ... the eternal joy translated into a moment’s ecstasy. But further back has not Aristophanes told us that the lark existed, not only before the green grass where it nests or the blue lift into which it soars, but before Zeus and Kronos themselves, before the Creation, before Time. It is but a symbol of the divine Joy which is Life: that most ancient Breath, that Spirit whose least thought is Creation, whose least motion is Beauty, whose least glance is that eternal miracle which we, seeing dimly and in the rhythmic rise of the long cadence of the hours, call by a word of out-welling, of measureless effluence, the Spring.

THE TRIBE OF THE PLOVER

In the preceding paper I alluded to a Galloway rhyme--

“Whaup, Whimbrel, an’ Plover, Whan these whustle the worst o’t ’s over.”

By this time the neatherd by Loch Ken and the shepherd among the wilds of Kirkcudbright, like their kin from the Sussex downs, to the last _sliabh_ or _maol_ in Sutherland, may repeat the rhyme with safety. ‘The worst o’t ’s over.’ For to-day the curlews cry above the moors, the whimbrel’s warning note echoes down the long sands o’ Solway, and everywhere, from the salt bent by the coasts to the loneliest inlands, the lapwing wails. The Tribe of the Plover is in the land once more, and so Spring is with us. Not, perhaps, the Spring of the poets, who look (as Ailil in the old Celtic tale) under boughs of white blossom to where the sunlight moves like a fawn of gold in a windless land, where the songs of birds turn to flowers, and where flowers change in the twilights of dawn into singing birds. Not thus does Spring come to us in the north. The black-headed gull screaming on the east wind, restless before his long flight to the wilderness and the grassy homes of the mating season: the hoodie-crow, weary of the south, heard on grey mornings when sleet whips the uplands: the troubled fieldfares, eager for lands oversea: the curlews crying along the Anglian fens and lamenting over Solway Moss: the mallard calling to his mate in the chill waters: the shadow of harrier and peregrine from Surrey upland to the long braes of Lammermuir--these, rather, are the signals of our bleak northern Spring. What though the song-thrush and the skylark have long sung, though the wheatear and chiff-chaff have been late in coming, though the first swallows have not had the word passed on by the woodpecker, and somewhere in the glens of Greece and Sicily the cuckoo lingers? How often the first have called _Spring_ to us, and, while we have listened, the wind has passed from the south to the north and the rains have become sleet or snow: how often the missel-thrush has rung-in the tides of blossom, and the woods have but grown darker with gloom of the east while the first yellow clans along the hedgerows have been swept by hail. How often, again, the wind of the west has been fragrant with cowslip and ox-eye, with daffodil and wallflower, with the pungent growing-odours of barberry and butcher’s-broom and the unloosening larch, when, indeed, the sallow-blooms have put on their gold, and the green woodpecker is calling his love-notes in the copses, and yet the delaying swallow has not been seen north of the Loire or where the Loiny winds between Moret and the woods of Fontainebleau? How often the wild-rose has moved in first-flame along the skirts of hornbeam-hedge or beech-thicket, or the honeysuckle begun to unwind her pale horns of ivory and moongold, and yet across the furthest elm-tops to the south the magic summons of the cuckoo has been still unheard in the windless amber dawn, or when, as in the poet’s tale, the myriad little hands of Twilight pull the shadows out of the leaves and weave the evening dark. But when the cry of the plover is abroad we know that our less ideal yet hardly less lovely and welcome Spring is come at last: that Winter is old and broken and shuffling north, clinging to the bleak uplands and windygates: and this, even though Summer tarries still among the fields of France.

Because of their association with solitary and waste places it is not strange that these harbingers of Swallow-time should everywhere have an evil repute. Even amid the unimaginative Sussex or Wilts peasants, the cry of the curlew, the wail of the lapwing, forebode sorrow, cover a vague menace: heard, at least, at dusk or at night, or in the grey gloaming at the edge of day.

The Cornish or Devon moorlander has many wild tales of the whimbrel, whose swift-repeated whistle hurtling suddenly in lonely places has given rise to innumerable legends of the Seven Whistlers, the Demon Huntsmen, the Hunted Souls. In Iona and along the Earraid of Mull, where the whimbrel or ‘little curlew’ is rarely heard till May, though it is generally called _Guilbinnach_, a diminutive of the Gaelic name of the curlew, _Guilbin_ (pronounced sometimes _Kooley-pin_ or _guley-pin_ and sometimes _gwilley-pin_), a compound word signifying wailing music, I have heard it called _Guilbhròn_ (Kwillyvrone), Wail of Sorrow, and again ‘_Keenyvàs_’ or Death-Cry, and once, either in a tale or poem, by the singular name _Guilchaismeachd_, the Wail of Warning. Any lowland cottar, from west of Lammermuir to east of Ballantrae, will ’ken a wheen strange tales o’ the whaup,’ as the curlew is commonly called north of the Tweed and south of the Highland Line: and in some parts it is not only the children who shudder at its cry in lonely places at dusk, fearing ‘the bogle wi’ the lang neb’ like a pair of tongs, emissary of the Evil One, who gave this bird his long curved beak so that in the dark he might, like tongs lifting a stray coal or a nightjar snatching a wandering moth, carry off wrongdoers, unrepentant sinners, truants, and all naughty children generally. As for the lapwing, though more familiar than the curlew, and for many of us associated only with pastures and pleasant wilds, in the countries of the Gael dark things are whispered of the _Adharcan-luachrach_, or Little Horn of the Rushes ... thus poetically called from the pretty tuft of the male _weep_ or _peaseweep_, curving like a horn over the delicately poised head, and from the bird’s fondness for nesting in rushy places or among tangled grasses. Is he not said to be one of the bitter clan who mocked on the day of the Crucifixion, and so was made homeless for ever, with a cry that should be for ever like the cry of wandering sorrow? It is of little avail to say that love among the rushes is as sweet as elsewhere, that the wilderness can be home, and that the wailing of repentant souls may be no more than angry vituperations against the hoodie-crow or laughing-gull or other marauders after lapwing-eggs. Is the _weep_ not a spirit of the waste that was once human, but lost his soul, and so can never reach heaven nor yet dwell on earth, but must night and day be restless as the sea, and wail the long hours away from grey dawn to moonrise, from darkness to the paling of the stars? So they say, they who know: and who know with the unshakable surety of the unlettered peasant? In the Gaelic imagination the lapwing is something stranger and wilder still: a bird of the ancient world, of the dispossessed gods, nameless in truth because in truth a god nameless and homeless. The Gaelic poet hears in its lament the lamentation of what is gone never to come again, of what long since went away upon the wind, of what is going away on the wind: and he has called the _weep_ the Birds of the Sorrowful Past. Is not the lapwing the bird of Dalua, that unknown mysterious god, that terrible Shadow who is the invisible, inaudible, secret, and dread divinity of weariness, separation, gloom, sadness, decay, desolation, madness, despair?

It is not only in our own land that the lapwing and all the tribe of the plover bear so evil a repute. Not always thus, however: for in some parts of Germany this plover, I do not know why, is called the Virgin Mary’s Dove, and is greeted with welcome. Even in Argyll there is a lost or confused kindly legend, for sometimes when children run along the moorland mocking the Pibhinn (_pee-veen_ ... the Gaelic equivalent of the lowland _peaseweep_ and the southern pee-_weet_) they cry

“_Welcome back, welcome back, Pēe-veen, Pee-vēen! But keep the wind and the rain behind your tail, Or you’ll never see the fields of heaven again!_...”

or words to that effect. In the East the Mohammedan women have a beautiful name for this bird ... the Sister of the Brother: and, says the authority whence in some forgotten reading I took this note, ‘when these women hear the cry in the evening, they run from their houses and throw water in the air, that the bird may use it to assuage the pain of the burn on the top of the head, still marked by some black feathers.’ This is in allusion to an oriental legend that the lapwing was once a princess. This princess had a passionate love for a brother who had long been absent, and when one day she heard that he was on his return and close at hand and weary, she snatched a bowl of hot milk from the fire and hastened to meet him. But an evil-wisher, knowing her great love and how she would not rest till she found her brother, had misinformed her, and for all the pain on her head caused by the heated bowl, she ran now this way and now that, continually crying _Brother! O Brother!_ Hours passed, and then days, and week after week and month after month the girl vainly sought her loved one. At last, feeling her strength ebbing, she cried aloud to Allah. Allah, moved by compassion, gave her wings and changed her into a lapwing or black-plover, the better to accomplish her purpose. Hence, when the little brown children on the desert or on the sun-scorched ways of the East look up and see the lapwings wheeling overhead in long circling flights and sudden dashes, they hear, in the wailing voices, either the long yearning or the sudden eager hope in the cry which to their ears sounds as _Brother! O Brother!_

Perhaps the German name of the Virgin Mary’s Dove is merely a variant of the Swedish folk-legend concerning the lapwing. The tale goes that this bird was once one of Mary’s handmaidens, but lost place and honour because of her theft of a pair of scissors. The punishment was transformation into a bird with a forked scissor-tail, and to go out across the fjords and above all the meadows and pastures and keep crying incessantly _Tyvit-Tyvit-Tyvit_ (_i.e._, I stole them! I stole them!). I think, however, I have heard or read the same story in connection with the wagtail. In his interesting book on the _Manners and Customs of the Russian People_, Mr. Ralston has the following Slavonic plover-legend. When God had created the earth, and wished to supply it with seas and lakes and rivers, He ordered the birds to convey the waters to their appointed places. All obeyed except the lapwing, whose reason for this indolence and impiety was that it had no need of seas, lakes, or rivers, to slake its thirst. At that the Lord waxed wroth, and forbade it and its posterity ever to approach a sea or stream, and that it might quench its thirst only with that water which remains in hollows and among stones after rain. So from that time this sorrowful plover has never ceased its wailing cry of _Peet-peet!_ (_i.e._, Drink! Drink!). In another northern book (Thiel’s _Danish Traditions_, vol. ii.) there are two lapwing-legends not less homely than the Russian and the Swedish.

When Christ, says one, was a bairn, He took a walk one day and came to an old crone who was busy baking. She said she would give Him a new cake for His trouble, if He would go and split her a little wood for the oven. Christ did as she wanted, and the old wife put aside a small bit of dough for the promised cake. When the batch was drawn from the oven, however, she saw to her surprise and chagrin that the wee bit cake was equally large with the rest. So again she broke off a small bit of dough; but again the same thing happened. Hereupon she broke out with, ‘That’s a vast oure-muckle cake for the likes o’ you; thee’s get thy cake anither time.’ At this injustice Christ was angered, so He said to the old crone, ‘I split your wood as you asked me, and you would not give me the little cake you promised. Now you in turn shall go and cleave wood, and that, too, as long as the world shall last!’ And with that Our Lord turned her into a _vipa_ (a weep). ‘So the weep fares betwixt heaven and earth as long as the world lasts; and fare where she will she says no other words than _Klyf ved! Klyf ved!_’ (_i.e._, Cleave wood! Cleave wood!).

The other Danish plover-tale given by Thiel is one of the familiar Crucifixion legends. While Christ still hung upon the Cross, three birds came flying towards Calvary, the Styrkham (the Stork), the Svalham (the Swallow), and the Pün-ham (Pee-weet). As they flew overhead each cried a cry. The stork cried, _Styrk ham! Styrk ham!_ (_i.e._, Strengthen Him!), and so has this bird called ever since, and been under God’s blessing and man’s care. The swallow cried, _Sval ham! Sval ham!_ (_i.e._, Cool or refresh Him!), and so is evermore known by that name, and likewise is loved by man and guided by God. But the weep wheeled about the Cross, shrieking derisively, _Pün ham! Pün ham!_ (_i.e._, Pine Him, make Him suffer!), and so is not only accursed by men from then till now, but is under God’s ban till the Last Day, after which the lapwing’s wail will never be heard again.

Although _Guilbinn_, or Wailing Music, is, as I have said, the common Gaelic name for the Curlew, as the Whaup in the lowlands, it is also often called the _Crann-toch_, the long-beaked one, or Coulter-neb, as they say in Dumfries and Galloway. Of the mythical origin of the name Crann-toch (a very obvious designation, and needing no mythical legend one would think) I remember hearing a year or so ago from a boatman of Lismore a wild and romantic legend, but it is too long to quote now. Few Gaelic tales, few poems, in which are not to be heard the voices of the wind or the sea or the wailing curlew. We have perhaps no bird more wild and solitary: a Highland saying places it with the herons and wild-geese. ‘When a man has shot six herons, six wild-geese, and six curlews, he may call himself a sportsman.’

When the Golden Plover, or Grey Plover as he is sometimes called, wheels in Spring above the fallowlands of the North the ploughman hears in his cry _Plough weel! Sow weel! Harrow weel!_ This beautiful bird--of whom no poet has written a finer line than Burns in

“The deep-toned plover grey, wild whistling on the hill”--