NESTS AND NESTLINGS.
THE winter publishing season has produced two books of special interest to outdoor-naturalists.* These are Mr. Kearton's photographs of the nests and young of birds, and Mrs. Blackburn's drawings of the birds of Moidart. Among the latter are some of the best and most original portraits of
• (1.) British Birds' Nests. With Original Illustrations. By R. and C. Eeartkn. London: Oilmen and Co.—(2.) Birds of Moidart. By Mrs. Black- burn. Edinburgh : D. Douglas.
the young of birds ever painted. Mr. Kearton's work is, perhaps, more new in form. He has taken his camera to the hedgerow, the mountain, and the loch-side, and photographed the nests in situ. An examination of these beautiful pictures explains in part why it is that " birdsnesting " is so attractive an art. They recall a hundred forgotten details of the minor beauty of the country, and enable us to estimate in some degree how much positive beauty, as well as charm of associa- tion, go to make up the pleasure of a day's birdsnesting.
The greater number of these photographs of nests "com- pose" naturally into a picture. Some seem almost too perfect ; yet no one who has found such nests himself will fail to realise their truth. Take, for example, the coot's nest, on the top of a single tussock, with the delicate, upright flowers, stems of the grass, rising straight above it; while the lower leaves fall off like bending sheaves of corn. The difference of nest position and surroundings, is shown in the two examples of the moorhen's neat. One, in early spring, set among the bare alder stumps, the other—a common example—in a bed of upright water- flags. The broad-bladed leaves rise vertically all round it, but some have been crushed down to form the nest, and others bent horizontally across to screen it from view above. The wonderful beauty of hawthorn foliage is best shown in the pictures of the blackbirds, greenfinches, and hedge-sparrows ; of the leaves of the oak, in that of the turtle-dove. The bull- finch's nest is embowered in hawthorn and wild-rose leaves. The reed-bunting's nest gives the wealth of growth in the damp ditches, crowded with rank grass, nettle, and lovely stems of meadow-sweet. Tree-tops—seen from a point of view which brings them level with the eye—are to most a reminiscence of boyish days of climbing. To photograph the larger nests—crow's, heron's, magpie's, and sparrow- hawk's — Mr. Kearton climbed the neighbouring trees, lashed his camera to the boughs, and so presents us with a true " bird's-eye view" of the site. Some of these pictures are as decorative as the Japanese studies of trees, notably one of a magpie's nest in a straggling pine. Then down to earth again, and we see the kingfisher's hole beneath the bank, taken from the middle of the River Mole, the artist being knee-deep in water. All the pretty rusticity of thatch- roofs, straw-built sheds, old orchard trees, the homes of starlings, missel - thrushes, and tits, are here,—things only studied closely by the prying birdsnester.
The great incident of a day's birdsnesting in the wood- land and hedgerow districts is the discovery of a cuckoo's egg. Pare luck, and nothing else, in most cases leads to this success, and, as in other enterprises, this present of Fortune is perhaps unduly valved. But it lends as much excitement as the chance woodcock does to a day's covert- shooting. On Whit-Monday of the present year, the writer, according to custom, spent the morning in seeking nests, and the only egg found was a cuckoo's. The fact was unusual in itself ; but the circumstances were such as to suggest a doubt whether the cuckoo is as clever as is supposed. The place was a perfect site for the smaller common birds to build. A spring broke out in a sloping meadow, filling a deep pool, while the high banks were surrounded with pollard willows, tall elms, and low ivy-covered stumps and bushes. But the long frost of last January had killed off nearly all the indigenous birds, except a few thrashes, whose nests had been robbed by the village boys. In the ivy growing on a pollard with a thorn-bush round its trunk, was a hedge- sparrow's nest, so ragged and dilapidated that it was ob- viously deserted, though the moss of which it was built was still green enough to suggest that it might be a nest of the year. The lining was out of place, and filled the inner cup with untidy rubbish. No birdsnester, certainly no sensible bird, would have given a second look at it, viewed in the light of a "going concern." The writer felt in the untidy lining to ascertain if the young had been hatched out, in which case some fragments of shell might have been left at the bottom. Instead, deep among the dishevelled lining, was an egg. It was a fresh cuckoo's egg, just laid. It could never have been hatched, and it was clearly a case, perhaps one of many, iti which cuckoo tactics lead to failure. This was not the only curiosity in the nest. It was partly lined with fragments of newspaper wadded into the fabric. Some of these when taken out proved to be part of the financial column of a daily paper, which, when pieced together, were found to be from the list of South-African Gold-Mining shares, including some of the popular favourites, such as "City and Suburban," " Croesus," " Crown Reef," " Durban Roodeport," " Ferreira," and " Geldenhuis." Those who seek omens from birds may perhaps find a field for conjecture in this " selection" by a hedge-sparrow, near the White Horse Hill. Mr. Kearton's picture of a wagtail's nest containing a cuckoo egg shows the former set in a bower of ivy leaves, growing on a garden-wall. It is a beautiful study, both from the grace with which the leaves fall, and the contrast of the nest with the dark background. Turning from this to Mrs. Blackburn's drawings, we find a most interesting first-hand confirmation of an account of the behaviour of the very young cuckoo, given by Sir William Jenner in a letter to John Hunter in 1788. Jenner wrote that the "little animal, with the assistance of its rump and wings, contrived to get the bird (a young hedge-sparrow) on its back, and making a lodgment for it by elevating its elbows, clambered back with it up the side of the nest till it reached the top, where, resting for a moment, it threw off its load with a jerk, and quite disengaged it from the nest it remained in this situation a short time, feeling about with the extremity of its wing, as if to be convinced that the business was properly executed, and then dropped back into the nest again." This was a newly-hatched cuckoo ; and even Waterton rejected the story as incredible. Mrs. Blackburn saw the same opera- tion, and not only describes it, but has drawn the scene with wonderful skill. The almost blind, naked cuckoo, with its bead so big and neck so weak that the former drops forward as if it were dead, is standing almost on tiptoe backing a half-fledged young pipit out of the nest." " The most singular thing," she writes, " was the way in which the blind little monster made for the open side of the nest, the only part where it could throw its burden down the bank. I think all the spectators were struck with horror and awe at the apparent inadequacy of the creature's intelligence to its acts."
Both Mr. Kearton and Mrs. Blackburn have pictures of eagle-nests. Of the two, the latter is the more interesting. The pencil has beaten the camera. But Mr. Kearton's photo- graph was taken under great difficulties. It shows a pair of downy eaglets, lying flat on a " messy" nest of small twigs and rubbish, with a half-plucked mountain-hare beside them. Mrs. Blackburn was able to draw her eaglet from a rock close by; and she has added what is necessarily an im- pressionist picture, but one of great interest and obvious truth, of the attack made by the old birds on a pair of collie-dogs which accompanied a shepherd to the top of the cliff, not many feet above the eyrie. The eagles look heavy and "lumpy," just as they do in some of the old Greek sculptures of eagles carrying prey, striking awkwardly, with the feet brought under and forward, like a game-cock spurring. The snarling, snapping dogs are also admirably drawn. Nesting sea-birds and wild-ducks have always been favourite subjects with photographers, from their tameness and stillness when sitting. But no more interesting scene has ever been represented than that of the gannets' nests on a ledge on Ailsa Craig, photographed in the clear light at 4 o'clock in the morning of an early summer day. The adven- ture had its dangers, and the story of the picture is typical of the difficulties, as well as of the success, of this new form of birdsnesting. " In getting down to the edge of the cliff," writes Mr. R. Kearton, " my brother placed too much de- pendence upon the stability of a large slab of rock, which commenced to slither down the terribly steep hillside at a great pace directly it received his additional weight. He nar- rowly managed to save himself and the camera with which he was encumbered at the time, from being shot over the lip of the precipice into the sea below." Then the screw fastening the camera to the tripod fell out, and it had to be fixed by some strong wing-feathers picked up on the crag ; and "while the artist held the camera to the tripod, the writer, from a more secure footing, held the artist by the coat-tails on to the Craig." The picture is notable in its way, showing the step- like cliff, the single sitting bird, and the infinite distance of silvery sea. The pictures of the red-throated diver's nest, by a Scotch lakeside, of the razor-bill's and other sea-birds' eggs on flower-adorned shelves of rock, are admirable ; and of its kind we have never seen anything so charming as the newly hatched goslings of the grey-leg geese among the deep heather. But these are matched by Mrs. Blackburn's draw-
ings of the young black guillemots,—perhaps the best picture of young birds of any kind which has yet been published. For living objects, even birds, the pen and the brush are still first. But for such " cameos " from natural history as the nests of birds in their natural setting, Dr. Rowdier Sharpe's, judgment on Mr. Kearton's photographs will not be ques- tioned. They " mark a new era " in the illustration of natural history.
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