A BIRD.LOVEit'S OBSERVATIONS.* THE difference between the seeing eye and
the unseeing eye is a vast one. The man with the seeing eye notices hundreds of things which are hidden impenetrably from other men, though the comedies and tragedies of nature are never wanting. "Why do these things not happen to me ? " we remember a well-known essayist exclaiming when he had read a description by a naturalist of a vixen prettily playing with her cubs. The answer should have been that if not that exact scene at all events others as good had been at the essayist's disposal all his life if he had known how to see. Consider the trained eye of the fisherman who can instantly see the ghostly form of the trout with its nose up-stream, as clearly as though it were lying in his hand, and the untrained eye of the person who can see in the river nothing but a confused mass of swaying shadows. Mr. H. J. Massingham has the seeing eye. But even when we have presupposed that he sees all that there is to see at a given spot, within a given period it still remains a wonder how he has found so much time to look. One would have thought that a man who consumes his life in writing and reading and who has given up his leisure lately to the advocacy of a great cause would not have enough time for the meditative contemplation of birds and their ways. This is surely a whole-time occupation, and even then the ordinary life would not be long enough.
Mr. Massingham seems to us to have evolved a very interesting philosophy about birds and indeed about all kinds of beasts. He does not state his philosophy in so many words ; it is only implied. But his writing about these things makes it plain to us that he regards beasts and birds as just the lower strata of organic life of which human beings are the upper strata. He writes about birds and beasts very much as he would write about the political or intellectual ambitions of his fellows. We must not be misunderstood. He does not attribute to animals and beasts an intellectual faculty ; he does not confuse instinct reason ; he does not indulge in that silly kind of anthropo- morphism which is charming in fables but is pestilential in any work pretending to scientific value. He never exposes himself to that sort of cynical criticism which was once directed at Landseer's pictures—" he makes his dogs like men and his men like dogs." Nevertheless, he does somehow think of animals— and to us it is very attractive—not merely as having embryonic faculties which may be expanded to one knows not what extent in the course of the aeons, but as already having such a place in the arrangement of life that they have an absolute right to the humane consideration of all men. He regards them as part of the social system. He regards them as destined to be brought more intimately into that system. We may have misunderstood him, but we think that these are ideas which he would not disavow.
We have not space even to refer to most of his subjects, but we took particular pleasure in reading his description of bird life on the Norfolk flats and his observations on the almost incredible variety of bird life in London. The tract of country which he describes on the southern shore of the Wash is certainly remarkable. Perhaps Mr. Massingham does not give enough credit to that Lord Leicester who reclaimed land from the sea without spoiling it. In that part of the world the sea, so far from being an enemy of the reclaimer, is almost his friend. On these low-lying coasts the sea tends to recede rather than encroach, and Lord Leicester's task was to bind together with marram grass and then by planting the reclaimed land and make it solid and sweet. Moreover, successive owners of Holkham ought to be praised for their admirable bird sanctuary. All this strip of coast is indeed fascinating, for the sea birds and the inland birds here mingle in a delightful and amicable confusion. Near-by is the ancient and tiny port of Wells, where tradition says that a vessel was launched by Lord Leicester, built of oak from a tree for which he himself had planted the acorn. Mr. Massingham does not, we think, state the whole truth when he writes of this shoulder of Norfolk as being a place where birds migrating across the sea are glad to make a landfall when they are blown out of their course. As a matter of fact, this oonier of Norfolk is one of the chosen migratory routes of the birds from Scandinavia If Mr. Massingham will watch there in October, he will see the endless column of immigrants flapping their way slowly out of the haze and coming to earth a little way inland where a temporary resting spot has been found. His description of the dunlins on the-wing is delightful. These • Some Birds of the Countryside: The Art of Nature. By H. T. Maseingbam• London; Fisher Uinwin. Ins. ed. net. birds are nearly always known as stints in Norfolk. Other names for them are " ox-bird " and " purre " ; and on the Essex coast they are compendiously described by the fishermen as "little birds." How one would like to know how the leader of a flock of hundreds of these little sand-pipers is chosen The whole flock wheels with electrical suddenness as at the word of command. The last bird never drags upon the first. When the sun glints upon their white under-parts they are like a storm of driven snowflakes, and when their dark upper-parts are turned towards you, or when they are between you and the sun, the whole flock has a black and elephantine solidity in the sky. With yet another movement, the razor-edge of the wings is presented as the flock wheels, and as though by magic the air seems to be almost empty. There is no more character- istic sight on the flats than the strings and wreaths of these magical birds on the wing, drifting like smoke in the distant sky.
Most readers will be astonished at learning how many different birds are to be seen in the outer parts of London. Mr. Massing- ham notices that the gulls having some years ago formed the habit of coming up the Thames for the winter now come earlier every year. He notices how crows in the London area, being unmolested, are increasing and are resuming a gregarious habit that at one time seemed to be lost. He notices how in his own district south of the Thames several thrushes have built their nests on the terminal branches of large trees. This, he thinks, must be the result partly of the few suitable nesting sites there- abouts and partly of the nests having been continually destroyed. It is not impossible, he suggests, that the bush-building habit may disappear among town thrushes.
We will end by quoting a passage in which Mr. Massingham writes of some of the rarer birds he has seen in outer London:—
" Fieldfares are very irregular visitors and only birds of passage, though I very occasionally flushed a few from the orchard in the winters both of 1018-19 and 1919-20. In March 1919 I once saw a pair of redwings fly into the open fields from the orchard, fly and disappear westward speedy as thought (they are the fastest fliers, as they are the handsomest of the British Turdinas), and that was the first and last I ever saw of them. Early in February 1919 I had what I believe is a unique experience. I was watching a large assembly of finches feeding from piled manure heaps on the Middlesex side of the river, when I saw to my glad surprise that among the sparrows, chaffinches and greenfinches there were thirty tree-sparrows and bramblings, the males of the latter, with their fawn breasts, mottled white rumps and upper plumage slashed and chequered with orange buff, chestnut and white being easily the first and boldest in beauty. Bramblings are an uncommon sight anywhere in England during the winter (they nest overseas) ; in London I doubt whether they have been observed anywhere for the last twenty or thirty years. Passer montanus is a much prettier bird than Passer dotnesticus, and easily distinguishable from it by its sleeker plumage, comelier shape, chestnut head, white collar round the neck, and conspicuous double wing- stripes. Unlike the house-sparrow, too, he does not 'affect neighbourhoods.' Ralph Hodgson told me he found a lesser redpole's nest within a dozen miles of the centre of London, and Mr. G. A. B. Dewar relates in Wild Life in the Hampshire Highlands that the butcher-bird and tree-sparrow nested the same distance away in '98. I found my bramblings and tree. sparrows less than six miles from Charing Cross, and they stayed for the rest of the winter except to make a migratory movement in March, (si magna lied) over to my side of the river within two hundred yards of my house. But they failed to return in 1919-20."
Previous page
