COUNTRY LIFE
The Weights of Birds How much do birds weigh ? What, for instance, is the weight of a heron ? A good specimen of heron may be over three feet in length, with a wing-span of five feet. Questioned as to its weight, two persons replied respectively twenty-five pounds and fifteen pounds. For myself, the question of the weight of birds being a thing to which I had never given any consideration at all, I should have guessed, roughly, ten pounds. All these figures are crazy. The weight of a fine specimen of male heron, according to that parochial but patient Victorian observer of English wild life, the Rev. F. 0. Morris, is only three pounds. For so large andvoracious a bird, a heron living on eels, rats, trout, young moorhens and even snipe, the figures seem incredible. Yet three pounds is a great weight for a bird. The snipe itself, male, weighs only four ounces, the female slightly more. The sparrow- hawk weighs only five or six ounces, with the female half as large again. A wood-pigeon weighs about twenty ounces, a moorhen sixteen, a herring-gull thirty. But it is the weight of the really small birds that is staggering. A nigiAingale weighs six drachms, a blue-tit under half an ounce, a chiff- chaff three drachms, a wren two and three-quarter drachms. Even a cuckoo, strong-flying, looking almost as large as a pigeon, scales only a quarter of a pound, a fraction more than a blackbird.
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The Mad Hare I often think the hare is almost the most attractive of English wild animals. There is nothing like the hare's powerful wild-eyed bolting. A single hare will behave with great sanity of purpose, straightforwardly, tearing to escape across corn or grass or ploughed land on a course as fixed and straight as a bullet's. Running from danger, indeed, he often runs straight into danger, simply because of the fixedness of his flight. He is caught like that. Ile is the victim of a too direct purpose. But in spring, gathered together, hares behave with an inexplicable lunacy that is like some idiotic mumming play. I have often seen a crowd of six or ten or more in a field of rough grass in February or March, behaving with a super- madness that was both baffling and comic. They would tear round and round in the field in spasmodic broken circles as though being chased by the ghosts of diabolical whippets : no purpose in it, no end, no beginning, only a mad careering to each other and away from each other and to nowhere at all. It was a great silly gambolling and leaping, as though the field were an asylum for moon-struck hares. Rabbits will behave similarly, though never so madly. They are mere feeble imitators, but even they, in spring crowds, will leap like lambs.
Wild Creatures in Crowds And so with most birds and butterflies and animals that flock together. They have special and individual moments of strange crowd behaviour : the great evening flight and settling and abrupt uprising, almost like an explosion, of starlings ; the pretty twittering silliness of linnets ; the solemn winter love-play of blackbirds, six or even ten in a gang, feeding on grass, eyeing each other, making discreet rushes and advances, almost nonconformist in their black suspicion and seriousness ; the comic cackling of rooks in times of storm ; the occasional savagery of stoats hunting by pack. Water creatures, fish especially, seem different. Except the water-boatmen, rowing as in a comic strip across the water-surface, in a delicious piece of comic seriousness, the crowds of water creatures behave with more design, as though drilled, as though perhaps under the domination of water. So even minnows will lie in small poised companies, in level order, all flicking off in one direction at the approach of danger. Schools of trout lie in sunlight as still as painted leaves, motionless against the current, keeping the same place for hours on end by the exercise of an astonishing strength, shooting off like clockwork darts at the fall of a shadow. It is as though intense training were essential for the perfection of the machinery of escape. Watching a school of trout, indeed, seeing it move off at an electric diagonal to vanish in a flash, you begin to marvel that man, using his primitive and cluMsy devices, should ever catch any fish at all. Snakes in Water Against the lovely, collective motions of fish, snakes in water look uncommonly sluggish. They seem to lose their sinuousness and go along in a slow silver worming, as if not quite in their element. In bright water, silvered by sun, they move invisibly except for the oval, crafty head swinging along like a piece of chequered steel. They delight in the camouflage of lilies, lying among the polished green stems with casual motionlessness, quite indistinguishable. Then they give themselves away by the habit of lying with their heads on the leaf-pads, drowsing, softly curled, so light that the leaf is still dry except for its habitual blobs of quicksilver. They move with extreme quietness, with even less noise than on land. But for all their silvery loveliness they look sothehow dangerously charged, silkily sinister. And sometimes, with bodies invisible, their approach is quite startling. It seems as if the head, disembodied, is swimming alone, moving with perfect instinct, like a torn leg of a fly after the body has been destroyed.
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The Comedy of Coots— Of all birds, coot on ice are most comic. They behave like heavy-bottomed old ladies on the glass floor of a ballroom. They are hopeless and helpless. Alone, they can stand still or make short perilous careful excursions without much risk or comedy. But when danger comes they are startled into retreat. For some reason they do not fly. They elect to proceed by ice, and it' is a procedure of absolute craziness. The coot flounder and flop and skate and hustle in some- thing of the same dumb burlesque fashion as penguins. They wobble and stagger and their legs fly from under them exactly, in fact, as though they were trying to skate. It is all patheti- cally comic. Once out of danger, they rest on the ice with an utter lack of dignity but with a dazed look of inunense relief at being able, at last, to stand more or less still.
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—And Rooks They are more comic, indeed, than rooks, which is saying something. Rooks have an air of comicality that is wicked ; they have the appearance of depraved reprobates. As I sit here, writing, a great crowd of rooks has just passed over, careering back to the rookery, with more fuss than a retreating army, and for no apparent reason. They have come up from the river where, it is quite likely, something has frightened them very much. But for all their fear they look and sound like a flock of bird comedians. The main flock, jackdaws too, goes over with a great panic of cackling and squawking as though to warn the world of an impending typhoon. And strangely enough the wind is getting up, has increased its velocity considerably even in the five minutes since they passed. It may be, then, not fear of man but really some fear of storm which has driven them. At any rate, they go over in a flight of serio-comic disorder. And they are fol- lowed, far behind, by a solitary rook who is the personification of all rooks and all rook comicality. Over he comes, bringing up the rear, a great bird cawing and cackling in fear and wrath as though he is a Jehovah among rooks, as though, after all, it is not man or storm but only he himself that is the terror. It is like some Biblical enactment of divine anger, of an awful rook-God descending with a loud voice on an offending people. All that spoils it is that it is so funny. It is as though God were to have appeared and chastised the Israelites with an irate umbrella.
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Not Before 9 o'clock
Country life has its mysteries. Calling at a village post office at 8.45 a.m. in order to buy a postal order I was astonished to learn that that article could not be bought until 9 o'clock. " I daren't let you have it," the postmaster said, as though I had tried to buy whisky. I asked why. He replied, as though the post office were a secret service and.not a public service : " Spies." The same comic rule applies, apparently, to parcels, stamps and in fact to post office business in general. Not before 9 o'clock—,in the country. Well, it's an odd world where a man may not buy. a drink after 10 o'clock at night, or a postal orde,r,, for fear of spies, before 9 o'clock in
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