Chapter I: Part 1

THE LONE SWALLOWS

_NEW NOVELS_

PENDER AMONG THE RESIDENTS FORREST REID

THE CROSS-CUT COURTNEY RYLEY COOPER

THE BEST GIFT OF ALL ROWAN GLEN

AS OTHERS SEE US MARMADUKE PICKTHALL

THE PIT-PROP SYNDICATE FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS

ROSEANNE E. MARIA ALBANESI

THE
LONE SWALLOWS

_by_

HENRY WILLIAMSON

“The beautiful swallows, be tender to them, for
they symbol all that is best in nature and all that is
best in our hearts.”

_Richard Jefferies._

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

Copyright, 1922

_Manufactured in Great Britain_

COMPILER’S NOTE

Most of the papers in this volume are published for the first time. A few have appeared in _The Daily Express_, _The London Evening News_, _The Field_, _The Saturday Review_, _The Outlook_, _The English Review_, and _The Wide World Magazine_. I am indebted to the Editors of these publications for permission to reprint them; and I am personally grateful to Sir Theodore Cook, of _The Field_, and to Mr. Austin Harrison of _The English Review_ for their encouragement and kindness in criticising and printing my earliest essays.

“Winter’s Eve,” the first attempt to describe the common sights and sounds of the English countryside, I include for reasons of sentiment. Nature writing, I have been told by some authorities on art, is regarded as a trivial thing--“nature,” according to those people, is but a frail base for art-creation. Those authorities, I discovered, did not know the difference between a linnet and a celandine. And they did not want to be told. But I imagine that, as children, they would have been delighted to see a linnet’s woven nest, and to be told that the celandine is the first of the wild flowers to fashion after a dreary winter a gold cup in the February meadows and woods. My own belief is that association with birds and flowers in childhood--when the brain is plastic and the mind is eager--tends to widen human sympathy in an adult life. The hope of civilisation (since we cannot remake the world’s history) is in the fraternity of nations, or so it seems to myself, whose adolescence was spent at the war; the hope of amity and goodwill of the nation is in the individual--in the human heart, which yearns for the good and the beautiful; and the individual is a child first, eager to learn, but unwilling to be taught. Therefore it would appear that the hope of civilisation is really in the child. Sometimes heredity may be too great a handicap, but a sweet environment is a gradual solvent of inherited vice; at least it will prevent hardness, whence springs un-understanding, and hate. It was on a Sunday in May, 1920, in a tramcar at Catford, a south-eastern suburb of London, that the seed of this thought was sown by the sight of children returning to the slums after a day in the country. How eager they were: and how their parents were happy! Immediately afterwards, in a visionary fervour, or, may be because I was very young, I wrote “London Children and Wild Flowers,” which Austin Harrison published, with Walter de la Mare as god-parent.

H. W.

SKIRR COTTAGE,
_11th November, 1921_.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE LONE SWALLOWS 1

LADY DAY IN DEVON 8

THE INCOMING OF SUMMER 14

HAUNT OF THE EVEJAR 30

A DESERTED QUARRY IN FEBRUARY 39

VIGNETTES OF NATURE (i) 41

VIGNETTES OF NATURE (ii) 43

HAWK NOTES 46

PROPHET BIRDS 50

A BIRD MYSTIC 53

SAMARITANS 57

SPORTSMEN OF THE RUBBISH-HEAPS 60

RUNAWAYS 65

LONDON CHILDREN AND WILD FLOWERS 68

MEADOW GRASSES 82

TIGER’S TEETH 96

THE OUTLAW 116

PEREGRINES IN LOVE 130

MIDSUMMER NIGHT 136

A FEATHERED WASTER 145

INVOCATION 150

COCKNEY BIRD TRIPPERS 154

“FULLNESS AFTER DEARTH” 157

CUCKOO NOTES 160

DAYS OF AUTUMN 166

SWALLOW BROW: _A FANTASY_ 182

WINTER’S EVE 196

ERNIE 204

A SEED IN WASTE PLACES 212

THE CHANGE: _A FANTASY_ 217

PROSERPINE’S MESSAGE 236

STRIX FLAMMEA 243

THE LONE SWALLOWS

Along the trackless and uncharted airlines from the southern sun they came, a lone pair of swallows, arriving with weakly and uncertain flight from over the wastes of the sea. They rested on a gorse bush, their blue backs beautiful against the store of golden blossom guarded by the jade spikes. The last day of March had just blown with the wind into eternity. Symbols of summer and of loveliness, they came with young April, while yet the celandines were unbleached, while the wild white strawberry and ragged-robin were opening with the dog violet. On the headland the flowers struggle for both life and livelihood, the sward is cropped close by generations of sheep, and the sea-wind is damp and cold. Perhaps the swallows hoped to nest, as their ancestors had done centuries since, in the cave under the precipice at the headland’s snout, or that love for its protection after the wearying journey was new-born in their hearts. One cannot say; but the pair remained there.

Days of yellow sunshine and skies blue as their wings greeted them. Over the wave crests and the foamed troughs they sped, singing and twittering as they flew. Kestrel hawks with earth-red pinions hung over the slopes of the cliffs, searching with keen eyes for mouse or finch, but the swallows heeded not. Wheatears passed all day among the rabbit burrows and the curled cast feathers of the gulls, chiffchaffs iterated their little joy in singsong melody, shags squatted on the rocks below, preening metal-green plumage and ejecting plentiful fish-bones. The wanderer on the sheep-track, passing every day, joyed in the effortless thrust of those dark wings, the chestnut stain on the throat, the delicate fork of the tail. Winter was ended, and the blackthorn blossoming--there would be no more snow or ice after the white flowers, fragile as vapour thralled by frost, had come upon their ebon wilderness of spines. The heart could now look forward, not backwards to other fled springtimes. The first swallows had come from distant lands, and three weeks before the winged hosts were due! One of the greatest of nature-writers wrote, “The beautiful swallows, be tender to them.” In fancy Richard Jefferies, too, was wandering on the headland, and watching the early vagrants, breathing the fragrance of the wild thyme that came like an old memory with the wind. Always dearly loved are the singing birds of passage, returning with such feeble wings to the land that means love and life to them, and love and life and beauty to us. Each one is dear; all the swallows returned are a sign and a token of loveliness being made manifest before our eyes.

The early April days passed, like the clouds in the sky, softly and in sunlight, merging into the nights when Venus lighted the western seas, and belted Orion plunged into the ocean. In the sheltered places the arums grew, some with hastate leaves purple-spotted, and showing the crimson _spadix_ like the tip of a club. Brighter grew the gorselands, till from the far sands they looked like swarming bees gold-dusty from the pollen of the sun. The stonechat with white-ringed neck and dark cap fluttered into the azure, jerked his song in mid-air, then dived in rapture to his mate perched upon a withered bramble. In a tuft the titlark was building her nest, while the yellowhammer trilled upon a rusted plough-share in the oatfield.

Sometimes the swallows flew to a village a mile inland, and twittered about an ancient barn with grass-grown thatch, haunted by white owls, and hiding in dimness a cider press that had not creaked in turning for half a century. Once they were seen wheeling above the mill pond, and by the mossy waterwheel, hovering along its cool gushings and arch of sun-stealing drops thrown fanwise from the mouldered rim. Everywhere the villagers hailed them with delight, and spoke in the inn at nights of their early adventuring. Such a thing had been unknown for many years; the oldest granfer had heard tell of it, but had never actually seen it before. The old man took a poet’s delight in the news, and peered with rheumy and faded blue eyes, hoping to see them when tapping along the lane to his “tater-patch.” It became a regular thing for the wanderer upon the headland to report their presence when he returned from the high solitude and the drone of the tide, and the yelping cries of gulls floating white in the sunshine above a sea of woad-blue.

Gulls selected nesting sites, and the sea-thrift raised pink buddings from its matted clumps. The ravens rolled in the wind uprushing from the rocks, and took sticks in black beaks to the ledge where they had nested throughout the years. The male bird watched upon a spar while his mate with throaty chucklings built anew the old mass of rubbish where her eggs would be laid. Sometimes he fed her with carrion filched from a pearly gull by the flashing and sunpointed foam, and she gabbled with pleasure. Ever and anon the fleeing specks of the swallows passed near, winding in and out, floating and diving, “garrulous as in Cæsar’s time.” Like kittens in distress the buzzards wailed, spreading vast brown canvas that enabled them to sail high among those silver and phantom galleons, the clouds. Steamers passing to the Severn basin left smoke trails on the horizon; the life of the sea and land, wild and civilised, went on; but no other swallows arrived. Light of heart the wanderer watched, and waited. Any day, new-born and blessed by Aurora, would see the arrival, any day now--two dark arrowheads fell with mighty swoop from heaven, arrowheads that did not miss their mark. There was a frail flutter of feathers in the sunshine, a red drop on the ancient sward, a scuttle of terrified rabbits, a faint scream trembling and dying in the blue. Then only the murmur of the sea far below and the humming of the single telegraph wire near the pathway. The peregrine falcons had taken the lone and beloved swallows.

LADY DAY IN DEVON

The rooks are now busy in the elms of the churchyard, and drifting thwartwise the wind with sticks for their nests. Sometimes a young male bird comes with food for his mate as she pleaches the twigs with claw and beak; she flutters her wings like a fledgeling, gapes widely, and squawks with satisfaction. Daws come to the trees, perching head to the south-west breeze, ejaculating sharply. Periodical visitants are the starlings, their songs of mimicry swelling with sudden rush and wheezing. One bird has learnt the chattering cry of a kestrel, the mating call, and deceives the rooks into thinking that one of the brown mouse-hawks is near. That rooks are thieves among themselves is well known, stealing sticks from their neighbours. To-day I watched one taking material that a young and enthusiastic sister brought with difficulty every five minutes or so from the distant beech clump. The thief was an artist, she was subtle, and cunning. A quick hop took her to the young bird’s pile, she seized a stick, and drifted upwards into the wind, swung round in a half circle and brought it to her own nest in the same tree with a soft _caa-caa_, as though implying relief at reaching home again. Her mate, judging by his white face, is an ancient bird; he is wise; he does no work; he fetches no food for his toiling wife; but perches near the nest, approving her method of labour, and guarding its results. He is the nearest approach to a bird “fence” that it would be possible to find.

A lane of red mud leads through the beech-clump. Life here is hard, but the celandines show their spoke-rays to the sun and wind-washed heaven, braving the half-gales that come across the Atlantic and twirl the fallen numbers of autumn’s leaves among their yellow flowers. A tawny owl lives in a pollard hornbeam in this clump; he comes regularly at dusk to my cottage and hoots with mournful insistence to the barn owls that roost under the thatch. Rabbits’ bones and fur, finches’ feathers, and the fragile skulls of mice hang in the crevices of the tree, hundreds of them, some fresh and white, others hidden under the brown dust of decay that trickles from the old tree’s dead heart. Tap his home, and he flaps out, pursued by any small birds searching for spiders or grubs in the spinney. The trees are dwarfed, bent by the salt winds; a few larches grew here, but never more the sap will rise and burst in emerald foam on their wispy branches. Constant buffeting with the winds of the ocean has killed them. A magpie is prospecting the mazed brittleness of one of them for a nesting site; she appears nearly every morning.

Beyond the clump is a combe, or valley, where every year a pair of carrion crows nest. They fly away as soon as they see me, four hundred yards below--they are crafty, and leave nothing to chance. In the stone hedges the celandines, flowers much bigger than those around London, shine like spilled meteor fragments against their leaves. Primroses grow with them, and the white blossom of the wild strawberry, and in places the stitchwort is in bloom. A flock of linnets sings in a hawthorn, a silver twittering of song coming as the wind rests; with a rustling of wings the flock leaves for the bloom of the gorse which everywhere is scenting the air. The apple trees in the orchard close below are beginning to bud, already goldfinches haunt their lichened branches, now fighting with gold-barred wings aflutter, now pausing to pipe sweet whispers of coming vernal glory, when the blossoms shall spill in showers of loveliness. Afar are the Burrows, and over their sogged wastes the green plovers wheel and fall, uttering wild calls to the wind, while their mates stand below, diving with broad pinions to earth as though they would die for love. High above a buzzard is sailing. To the right a great horse draws a plough against the skyline, and a dozen gulls follow in its wake; behind them trip and whistle four dishwashers, or wagtails. They say in the village that three pairs of ravens are nesting on the headland this year; I have seen but one. In this district a raven has only once been known to kill or “eye-pick” lambs, but that was many years ago, and then their breeding ledge was robbed in revenge. The raven has come near to extermination, like the peregrine falcon; but here both of these mighty fliers rarely molest the belongings of man; the one feeds on offal and dead rabbits that the stoats have left, and the other takes stock-doves, oystercatchers, wild duck, snipe, and ring-plover. In the early spring they stoop at gulls and diving birds just for exuberance of spirit. Certainly every tide leaves its dead among the seaweed and the beach-wrack: gulls and auks with their backs torn and ripped by the swift blue-hawks.

THE INCOMING OF SUMMER

Where by the stream the towers of the wild hyacinth bore their clustered bells, sought by that gold-vestured hunchback the wild bee, the willow wren sang his little melody, pausing awhile to watch the running water. The early purple orchids grew with the bluebells, their spurs upraised, their green leaves mottled with purple. Already the blackthorn had put forth its blossoms, a sign of frostless nights and warm days; already the blackbird had planted its nest in the alder bush. Now the year would advance till the grain was bronzed and the red arms of the reaper-and-binder whirled among its baked stems. Following the green and silver windings of the water the blue swallows hovered and fell, but the cuckoo’s voice had not yet called from the pheasant coverts. Any dawn would be welcomed by his mellow note, for over the sea and the land the winged hosts were passing, urged by the love they bore the thicket or the hedgerow that had weaned them, and for which in parched lands they had pined. From the time of the early sweet violet the migrants had been returning, and their journeyings would continue till the time of the first poppy.

The willow birds perched on the wands of the sallows, and the swallows twittered as they glided. Two singing notes, oft repeated, came from an ash tree where an olivine chiffchaff was piping his simple music. Throughout the gusty winds of March dust-laden and with only the celandines to tell of hope, he had been piping by the brook, a wanderer whose notes would be heard till the blackberries of October. The allotted span of the celandines was over, their rayed spokes of yellow were bleached--the wheatears were flitting upon the swarded downlands. The flowers had gathered to themselves all the light that the sun of early spring had flung between swift clouds, the seeds were formed, their hopes fulfilled. In their place came wild strawberries and herb robert, the dog-violet and the speedwell.

The meadow grasses were not yet tall enough to sigh at the wind’s soft passing, but a red admiral had been joying in the sunlight for many days. Down by the streamlet the moor-hen had woven her rushy nest, bending an arch of withered sedges over her labour to hide the speckled eggs. In the mud of the pebbled shallows her webbed feet left a track as she sought for beetles. Small spoors, the imprint of little claws, showed where a vole had made quick passage across a mud-bank. In the turfy bank its retreats were tunnelled, leading to a domed hollow lined with grasses--here her young would shortly nestle. From the stream and the shallow the rushes were rising, green spearpoints scarce sturdy enough to conceal the nest of the wild duck. Now they were thin and over-sharpened, as though exhausted by the effort of straining upwards to the light to which the sacrificial flowers would be offered in June; then they would be “thick and sappy,” annealed; in winter the cattle would tread their dried stems upon the beaten floors of the shippen.

Over pebbles, wine-stained, gray, rusted and brown, the stream tumbled, around mossy boulders and under branches, swaying dreamily the drowned poa grasses. Brook-trout lurked for the gnats that sometimes brushed the surface with trailing legs. Where the wind was stayed by arch of hazel and willow the midges danced their nuptials, in ghostèd assembly rising and falling. The time of the mayflies was not yet, their brief pageant would be heralded by the myriad trumpets of summer’s insects; summer was still shyly virginal. No sunbeam had yet touched the buttercup, unblazoned was the shield of the meadow by _gules_ of poppy, _azure_ of cornflower, or _argent_ of feverfew. Fragile were the greeneries of the hedge above the brooklet, sweet the primroses under the stubbed roots of the ash trees. Loveliest is the year when “sumer is icumen in,” when the willow wren, slim as he perches on an amber wand, sings all the love in his heart.

Something is moving in the nettles which the bullocks have not trampled. Their hooves have impressed cloven hollows at the marge, but the nettles are unspoiled. A tangled song comes from the middle of the patch, incoherent and unceasing. The pointed leaves quiver as the motion continues. Presently a little bird with a fawn breast jerks into the air, flutters a moment, and then disappears. It is a whitethroat, and till now his presence in the countryside was unknown. Ecstasy, uncontrolled and rising from his heart like the spring in the hillside, has all his being enthralled. The trembling of the nettles and the husky voice continue, and a brown bird passes over the nettled sanctuary. It is a wren carrying a leaf to the house that after two days’ labour is nearly built. Swiftly he pushes the oak leaf into place, then mounts a dry bramble jutting above the pleached ash and hazel branches, and from his pine-spindle of a beak pours a ringing melody. The fervour of the crackey’s song is so intense that in comparison with his size and minute cocked tail it appears an impossibility--he is a Swinburnian singer. His vernal feelings are so strong that in the interval of vocal exclamation he fashions many spare nests, most of them loosely and carelessly made. The shanty in the dead ivy around the oak is constructed of withered leaves that harmonise with its surroundings; he has another in a hayrick near, formed of dried grasses; a third in a green bush composed wholly of moss fetched from a bank in the sunken lane.

The whitethroat and his mate have jerked away, the willow bird slipped upstream, the cock-wren with cocked tail is stuttering an alarm. Down by the water’s edge a reddish animal nibbles a shoot held in its paws. Perceiving that it has no hostile bearing, the wren is silent. At the slightest movement the vole will dive with a musical and hollow plop into the water and swim to concealment. Quietly it finishes the sappy stalk, then creeps under a thick stem of cow-parsley, the florets of which are budding. Finches pass over, calling to each other, and a silver chirruping announces a wagtail. He alights on a smooth gray boulder, slender in outline and poised on fragile legs, flaunting a breast of daffodil. The hen-bird follows, and they perch together. Their long tails move as though to maintain an earthly balance, so faery-frail are they. She leaves him, flitting in wavy flight to another boulder. He follows, but she is restless. Downstream they pass, stopping for a moment on a jutting fragment of rock in the stone hedge, peering into a cavity. Throughout the summer the gray wagtails will haunt the brook, for within the cave foundations of their nest are already laid, fibres sought inside the pollard willows.

Those galleons the clouds have sailed into the north-eastern main, and no canvas or furled rigging are visible. For weeks no treasure of rain has been brought for the earth to spend with lavish abandon on verdant raiment, no largesse of shower has been thrown to the humble chickweed or vagrant sorrel. But on the surface of the land green things are stained with sap and charged with alchemising sunbeams. The secret of the philosopher’s stone, anciently sought to change baser metals to gold, has remained undiscovered through the ages, nor has the countryman ever found the crock of spade guineas at the rainbow’s end. These would bring luck; even now we strive to find their counterpart. In the cities, perhaps: youth storing the gold that one day will mean happiness: towards the evening of life, maybe, with sight dulled to a flower and the song of the swallow never heard. Sunlight is all to the flowers. It distils for them their scents and sweet nectars, it fashions their petals and ambrosial pollen. The sun loads the galleons of the airy fullness with the rain drawn from the ocean, unlading its cargoes upon the million wharves of the earth.

Peeping from ivy-bowered seclusion for sight of flashing hawk, a robin slips like a copper oak leaf from its nest. Inside the lined cup of bent and horsehair five naked fledgelings lie sleeping. By the pale cuckoo flowers the mother searches, capturing with swift movements insects that toil among the rootlets. She returns with a beakful, but her children will not rouse from slumber. A chirping comes from the hedge above, where a drab hedge-sparrow has her brood. She inspects with grave demeanour their orange gapes and divides the food among them. They gulp, then plead vainly with hoarse squeaks for more. Over the hedge she drops, joining the host of wrens, whitethroats, blackbirds, thrushes, and red mice, all looking for food.

The rising club of the wild arum is purple within its sheath; soon the “lords-and-ladies” will attract the children to their “river.” The stream is singing a mazed melody of soft sounds; by listening intently each can be distinguished. Different notes arise from the shattering of a crystal bubble upon the stones, the hollow dripple of a pebble rolled over the shallows, the foamy swirling past willow trunks moss-covered, the splashing into dwarfed trout-pools. Where a sunbeam loads the ripples a gold network drifts over the sand, holding a twig in its eddy; or the wind stirs the leaves, and a million sunpoints are thrown upwards like a silvery flight of starlings. From the mud precious doubloons have been raised by the root-divers of the kingcups, and are cast thickly by the bank.

Behind the hedge the gorse grows, stretching up the hill in spiky profusion of rusted jade and orange. Under the roots a colony of rabbits has been founded, and the does are scratching fur from hind legs to line the dug-outs where their little ones will be yeaned. A long-tailed titmouse spies a furry fragment, seizes it, and carries it to her nest in a distant bramble. With faint rustling of wings a linnet alights upon a bush, and sings to the mate who is weaving her cradle. Among the apple blossoms below, soft cadences are borne in the sunshine--the goldfinches cannot cease the telling of their happiness. A greenfinch answers with wistful, long-drawn note, and a corn bunting repeats his song again and again. Primroses, daisies, and the scentless violet grow on the turf under the spinney, where the larches have concealed their brittleness with emerald buds. A high twitter comes from one, and almost immediately a bird smaller than a wren flits moth-like to the ground. Its crest is a pencil-mark of fire. At the extreme end of a branch a ball of moss and lichen moulded with spider webs and caterpillar cocoons is suspended. Here the Golden-crowned Knight and his lady love will flitter throughout the days of summer, leading their children from the swinging castle as the voice of the cuckoo falters in June. Flocks of these birds roamed the pine forest during leafless days, when their shrill needle-lances of sound scarce pierced the wind’s moaning. Now in coppices and spinneys they seek the unchivalrous spider and the insects that crawl upon the sprays. Here under the trees is shade and solitude. I will stay and dream. But I want more beauty, and am restless; to me floats the voice of the stream for ever calling; I must return to the sunlit waters and the bended sedges.

All the loveliness of fled summers returns to the mind. The spread disk of the dandelion, so richly hued, is more beautiful now, bearing in its colour so many hopes of the past. A common flower, a despised weed, yet a symbol of that pulsing golden happiness that is the heritage unclaimed of so many. The bees and the birds need no philosopher’s stone, they have something better in the sweet air, they live every moment happily. In careless childhood the dandelions were beheaded with a stick; they are now a token of joy, these common weeds, taking shallow root wherever the wind flings their seeds. Summer to me would be incomplete without the dandelions. For what they symbol, would that there were more in the drifted dust of the cities. The music of the brook has risen from a murmur to a dull thunder, and a humming sounds under the maples. The miller has lifted the weedy hatch, and the ponderous stone wheels are crushing the grain. In the pond the tench lie unseen, but the light flames upon the scarlet fins of the roach as they pass. Silently the flume slides forward, then gushes into the troughs of the great elm waterwheel. Jets of water spurt from its old mossy planking, and a rain of drops is flung from the trundling rim. Inside the miller feeds the hoppers, and upon a beam perch two swallows, unheedful of the shake and the thunder. A dust floats in the millhouse, hazing the glass windows and giving to the cobwebs a snowy purity--embroidering the robes of the corn-spirit. For centuries the wheat has been ground between the fixed bed-stone and the runner, for centuries the stream has worked for mankind, its splashing imprisoning the light of the southern sun falling athwart the wheel. I thought of the men that in the past had laboured for the wheat, of the times the millpeck had grooved the stones, and the millstaff proven their setting. The millwheel is very old and will soon turn no more, but still the human sorrow and the hunger goes on.

Across the way stand dark yew trees beneath whose stillness the grave-stones, patched with gray and orange lichens, throw their shadows upon the grass. The suns of summer have bleached them, autumnal rains washed them, wintry frosts worked graven patterns upon the ancient letterings. The stream flowed then as now, many times had the swallows returned to their mortared houses under the rafters and up the broad chimneys--think of all the beauty repeated. Centuries of apple blossom, scented beanfields and floating thistledown; all the happiness of harvest garnered; all the hunger and the misery of man, ever striving with his neighbour. Can you not see what the dandelion tells? The swallows on the beam know no passage of time--they look forward to no happiness--they have no illusions--all is for them now. The calendar is not for them. Joyous they are, and wild; their hopes are not for to-morrow--the to-morrow of the mounded earth--but for to-day.

Summer comes in with their return, though the calendar shall deny. Summer: the very name brings to the heart a feeling of joy. There is so much for all, so much beauty of thought stored in the raggedest dandelion. Sunshine, the swallow, and the celandine: to know these in childhood is to take to the heart the glory of summer for ever.

HAUNT OF THE EVEJAR

_i_

When the first white flake falls from the hawthorn the immigrant birds of passage all have come to the countryside. Almost the last to arrive this year on the south-western coast of England were the mysterious nightjars, birds ever surrounded by romance on account of their weird song and phantom habits; and for me, after the experience I had in the late spring, birds of wonder and having a special claim to my affections.

It was night, and on the broad smooth sands, whence the tide had ebbed, shone a curved moon. As I passed by the ocean’s edge its outline shook in the sandy pools, blackened and tarnished by seaweed and still foam-bubbles. No clouds drifted in heaven, there was no wind, the stars were pale in the luminous sky. Somewhere in front of me a curlew, disturbed at his nocturnal feeding, whistled plaintively. A mile away lay Baggy like a badger asleep.

High above this promontory is an established air-line, or hereditary route for immigrant birds. Along this track travel the chiffchaffs and wheatears in March, the martins, warblers, and all the singing hosts in April. Sometimes the night wind bears a million feeble cries as the tired travellers pass over. It is a place of enthralling wonder in the youth of the year--and of sadness when autumnal days bring a weary return.

The night was quiet, the wavelets broke on the sand, a great sigh filled the air. From a sighing it swelled to a rushing of wind, it grew in volume like a drift of leaves in wintry blasts. Then soft thuds overbore the strange noise. I stood still. From afar and near came little croakings, as though of exhaustion and pain. Dark bunches lay on the sands. I picked one up; it was warm and feathery, its wings fluttered feebly. The nightjars, called of olden time goatsuckers, on account of a wide gape and owl-like eyes, had returned to the land for their yearly nuptials.

There were hundreds of them on the shore. All were too weak to move. I was filled with a great tenderness for them; they showed no fear; I liked to think they knew I would not harm them. The night went on; an owl bayed on the gorse slopes behind. Soon they left, with flapping flight, sometimes hopping. Towards dawn the valley and the hills were filled with their notes rising and falling like the whirring of a spinning wheel, the love song of the evejar.

The bee-swallow, as the nightjar is also called, pairs for life. It is a faithful idealist, like the owl, the falcon, and the long-tailed titmouse. It feeds on moths and chafer-beetles; and lays two eggs among the bracken.

Next morning the sun burned in an azure sky. The gulls wheeled over the surf, seeking poor soddened bundles of feathers that only a little while since had been filled with hope and spurred by love to cross the ocean, but had fallen into the water and been drowned.

_ii_

Returning from inland fields, three gulls with tranquil evening flight passed over the hill towards the headland. A sheep path wound irregularly over the hill, amongst the heather and the uncurling brakeferns. From here the western ocean was seen afar, until it met the clouded heaven. A subdued roar, a growling under-current of sound, floated up the hillside, although the sea was calm. Night and day, for thousands of years, the same ceaseless mutter of the shifting tides upon the sands, the same pounding of the headland as the tons of gray-green water slid over the rocks and into its hidden caverns.

A small wind moved the heather, and shook a dog-violet with its face turned to the westering sun. It was the tail of the sea-breeze. The air over the fields was cold, and soon it would move down to the sands to explore the darkling sea still warm with the fervour of the sunbeams. A late bee droned among the birds-foot trefoil on the pathway, eager to gather more honey for the winter. The yellow flowers grew low down, and some were stained with deep, tawny orange, as though Antares, the dull red star of summer, had joined its blessing of colour with the greatest gift of beauty and life bestowed by the sun. Near them grew the germander speedwell, also lowly (for the salt winds that sweep the hill care nothing for the humble things of the earth) their sweet blue eyes turned in wonder to the great flower of the sky. A lark with crest upraised waited upon a hummock of mould thrown up by a rabbit--her nest was somewhere near, hidden in a tangle of burnet-rose. The bee left the trefoil, and droned away down the hill. A blackbird sang in the valley below, where gorse, blackthorn, bramble, and stunted holly choked an ancient waterbourne between the steep hills. It was evening, and he chanted to the departing splendour. Alone sang the sable artist, serene on a twig of blackthorn, having no illusions about life, fretted by no unnecessary labour or research, for ever happy in the sunshine or sleeping restfully as the stars burned above the lonely valley.

Over the sea a golden beam of light trailed from a cloud and lit the gray waters. The massed vapours opened and other beams cast their gilt on the waves. A full rigged sailing ship, vague in the distance, entered the sacred gleam and became a barque of glory passing into the unknown. Nearer the shore, where the white lines of surf crept up the sands, a silver glitter danced and threw a million silver points for the mind to dream upon--as though an Immortal had flung the Golden Fleece for mortal eyes to see. Slowly the sun sank seawards; the beams were dulled; the ship became once more a drab wanderer on its human mission; a wild mew came down from heaven. With dark wings motionless, a buzzard sailed circlewise, although the hour of hunting was over. Higher and higher the great bird soared, controlling the winds of evening. In his mastery of the air he joyed, as though desiring to outsoar the stars that soon would glimmer over a quiet world. Below on the flats a flock of ring-plover ran to their feeding; their nests were among the pebbles and bleached seaweed near the dunes of the Burrows. Although unseen, their presence was known by the sweetness of their call-notes.

Like a cannon-ball heated to a crimson glow was the sun behind the vapours where a fume of vague light appeared over the hills to eastward. More sinister grew the outline of the headland, a beast replete and resting its shaggy head on sunken paws. No gulls drifted to their nocturnal roosting; the buzzard had plunged into the hidden pinewood to his eyrie. Here a vast collection of sticks, rabbits’ bones, rats’ tails, beetle skins and skulls of voles, carried there during a score of years, and resting in a fir, supported his brooding mate and her three blotched eggs.

When the moon was up an evejar rose from the patch of swaled gorse; the creamy marks on its wings and tail were visible in the confluence of light from the gates of heaven--the flood of the moon’s white fires and the lingering afterglow over the Atlantic. In anguish at the violation of its hymeneal sanctities the skep-swallow returned and wheeled, beating its wings together. No sound disturbed the silence, no movement stirred the bracken; only a mouse rustled in the dried brambles, only a chafer beetle, booming through the dusk, sought a dew-drop on a leaf of foxglove. The birds, wedded for all time, returned together and settled on the ground. Then the male bird mounted a stump of gorse, crouched low, and poured forth a reeling song. Like the risp of a grasshopper it came, like a shaken matchbox, like a crowstarver’s clappers heard afar. Against the moon the evejar sang his song, whispering huskily of his ecstacies during the pause. Sometimes he waited for the shy answer of his love--she who had journeyed over foreign wastes with him to the remembered valleyside of heather. Soft was her rapturous murmur in the summer night, a gentle reassurance of faith and hope, while the stars shone in the sky above them. Like spun and argent coins the moths went down to the dew-sweetened flowers. Only a reverent watcher and the pure face of the moon saw their espousal.

A DESERTED QUARRY IN FEBRUARY

Many celandines are now showing a yellow cup to the sun; a dearly loved flower the celandine, braving the frosts and the loneliness, with only the windrifted leaves of a dead year for company. But its courage makes it beautiful--one of the first of the players in the country orchestra of scent and colour and loveliness to take its seat in the amphitheatre of spring.

On the railway embankment the coltsfoot flowers are rising. How can one be sad when Proserpine will shortly float over the meadows and the woodlands? Now we must lift our hearts above earthly unhappiness, and, with Nature, be joyous.

What matter the fallings of so many leaves in the past when to-day the wild and happy humble bees are passing in the sunshine, dusty from the pollen of the willow-palm? That the symphony of summer must die in autumn’s cadences is inevitable, but now the grass is rising on the crumbled brick rim of the deserted limekiln, and on the pile of chalk a wagtail calls to his mate.

There are the sweet notes of the finches who are fluttering round the weeds of the wasteland, and the distant caw of rooks. A great cloud rushes in the sky; the light is checked. It is cold once more. But every day the sun swings in a higher curve; over the sea the call has gone, and even now the migrants in Africa and Egypt are restless.

Very soon the chiffchaff will pipe his monotonous tune by the lake, and the wheatears will be back on the sward of the downlands. A few weeks and the cuckoo will call in the forest and the swallows glide around the barns and the ricks--“all the living staircase of the spring, step by step, upwards to the great gallery of the summer.”

VIGNETTES OF NATURE

_i_

From their tussocks upon the sward the pink flowers of the sea-thrift are rising. In one clump a pippit has its nest. The male bird rises high in the air, then falls suddenly, singing his little sweet song; he regains height by mad flutterings, sing-sing-singing all the time. In the matted turf the leaves of the wild thyme give a faint fragrance to the hands. Near by is the skull of a finch, whitened by the sun and the rains. Perhaps the falcons left it there, or one of the buzzards; or a herring gull chased and killed the bird, for gulls are prepared for any villainy. But it is still of use to something. A small spider lurks within its shadowed emptiness.

Reclining by the precipice edge one morning in May I was made curious by a sudden sweeping of gulls from the cliff-face (where they nest) to the sea. Two or three hundred, white in the sunshine, flapped and glided in a narrow circle by the rocks far below.

I looked carefully, but could see nothing. The spiral of tumbling whiteness and wild noise continued. Something in the green water was causing intense excitement. From all directions other sea-birds swept up; only the black shags squatted indifferently on their favourite rock. Then I saw a smooth, dark form swirling in the water, and heard a hoarse bark; the next moment it had dived. It was a seal. Presently the glistening animal rolled on the surface with a huge dogfish held in his jaws. The gulls screamed; a shrill clamouring broke out as the seal, having bitten the fish in two, threw one part into the air, caught it endways, and swallowed it. Round the Point he swam, while the birds fought over the remains. Presently he appeared with a writhing conger-eel, which with the greatest ease he bit up into little pieces.

An old fisherman, known as The Tiger, told me that the seal had been there for the last twenty years, and that so far as was known it had no mate. It showed no fear of a boat, and often came up alongside one, inspected it with filmy eyes, and quietly disappeared.

_ii_

In spring the gulls throng to their colony upon the headland. When disturbed, they cry wildly, and circle in the air. Once as I lay in the sun listening to the sea-fret a sharp chattering overbore the wailing of the gulls, and a pair of peregrine falcons swept by.

In but a moment, it seemed, they were half a mile high, flying with incredible swiftness, the male chasing the larger female. From the direction of Lundy Island a pair of stock-doves came across the sea, no mean fliers. They saw the wheeling falcons, and fear doubled their wing-beats.

I watched the hawks in their mad love chase, and then the tiercel saw the doves, closed his pinions, and fell from a thousand feet to the terrified doves in a few seconds. I have seen scout machines diving in France, but the peregrines, one behind the other in echelon, seemed to stoop with greater speed than the fastest of them.

In fear the gulls fled to their crannies in the cliff-face. There was a flurry of feathers as the male hawk struck the leading pigeon; he dropped it, swerved, and struck the other, while his mate clawed his first kill. Upwards, with the dove suspended in her talons, she climbed. A heavy black raven flapped to the dove whose blood was staining the green sea as it lifted in the swell.

The peregrine screamed--_check, check, check_--and dropped on the heavier pirate, who, as the hawk came above him, rolled over and held up his javelin beak. The hawk slipped, regained height, stooped again, was met with the great beak, and then flashed away chattering towards the mainland, followed by his mate.

The next moment a crowd of gulls splashed and quarrelled over the dead pigeon, the raven a sombre fellow amid their whiteness; the rabbits crept from their burrows; and in the sunshine the tiny pippits jerked towards heaven in weak flight, then fell, singing and trilling. And life in the springtime went on.

HAWK NOTES

A cloud from the sea dragged over the mountain so that the buzzards wheeling in the upper air were hidden, and only their mewling cries came down. I suppose they outsoared the cold autumnal vapours; they often sail in the heavenly freeness a mile and more above the earth, broad wings for ever lifted by the winds.

These big hawks are quite common in the West Country; I have seen as many as ten pairs on the wing at once. They are clumsy in the lower air, flapping heavily and beating over the slopes of heather and gorse very much like an owl. But when they attain to high solitude they are transformed. Sometimes as they turn the sun throws a golden lustre on their pinions.

All the British hawks that I have seen--kestrel, sparrowhawk, merlin, peregrine falcon, buzzard, and marsh harrier--hover to find their prey. Their hovering may be prolonged, or for an instant only. The kestrel leans on the wind, the sparrowhawk (I am referring to those that hunt in the open) dashes down wind, swings up, poises, then dashes down at his prey. The peregrine falcon hangs high above the cliff slope or the inland fields. He and his mate, hunting together, are like two black anchor-heads. Even in a considerable wind they are not disturbed. They remain fixed till something is seen, and then they fall, head first, swifter and swifter, plunging at an enormous rate. If they are within three hundred yards, and the day is still, you may hear the hissing of the stoop. They strike their victim and smash it, or miss altogether, abandoning after three failed stoops. The male usually follows the female should she miss.

Buzzards--spanning nearly four feet--are the most graceful hoverers. They hang, with wings arched back, a few yards over the rabbit runs through the gorse and the bracken. A fairly steady breeze is needed to keep them stable. I have watched for more than a minute a buzzard hanging thus, moving only its tail. The secret of its poising is that it _falls_ continually on the wind, pressing its breast into the flow to counteract the lifting impulse of its wings.

Once I saw a buzzard glide down a hill at about eight miles an hour, a yard from the ground, its feet hanging below, ready to grasp something. Its slow slip downwards (“glide” would convey too rapid a motion) amazed me--it might have been sliding on a wire. Eventually it alighted, and rose with a lashing snake. The reptile was too much for it; the buzzard rushed about in middle air, turning and screaming. Eventually the snake fell to the ground.

I know an eyrie in a pinewood composed of nearly two hundredweight of sticks. It is about seven feet across, and quite as deep. For half a century and more it has been repaired every spring. Years ago I took the three eggs and lay for a long time in the nest, trembling with joy. The old birds were frightened to come near. I still have those eggs.

The buzzards nested there this year, but I could not climb up. The nest was at a terrible height. Underneath were hundreds of rabbits’ skulls, rats’ tails, beetle skins, and the feathers of small birds. Perhaps in the years to come when I go there I shall be terrified to see an eager face looking over the nest, and a shrill, triumphant voice exclaiming, “I say, father, I’ve got three eggs. What a bit of luck!”

PROPHET BIRDS

One September morning there wheeled a great concourse of gulls over the headland. Through the mist their cries came wild and plaintive. Old men in the village said that it meant a big storm.

I did not believe that birds could prophesy. Having studied the phenomena of nature for many years, I have come to know that everything happens by chance. For instance, during the autumn of 1920 severe wintry weather was forecasted because the hawthorn peggles were plentiful, and the granaries of squirrels were more numerous than usual. Quite a number of journals and periodicals stated these “portents” quite seriously. What illusions! The spring of that year was mild, the hawthorn blossom beautiful, and unravaged by frost. Hence the peggles. As for the squirrels, they found a goodly fall of beechen mast, and promptly stored it!

But to return to the gulls over Baggy Point. There must have been two or three thousand of them, floating and wailing. “A master storm be cumin’,” said the granfers.

All that day, sunlessness and quiet seas. I told the granfers that they were wrong (I am young and self-confident). I explained that their knowledge of nature was not great--had one not told me that swallows sleep in the mud of the river Taw during winter?

But that night clouds came up and hid the stars, the owls called mournfully, the wind shook the elms in the churchyard. A moan under the door, a rattling of the window; the spaniels on my bed whined uneasily. Something was astir--a great silence hollow and foreboding. The chimney tun hummed a little song of rue in the dark; I was instantly awake, and waiting.

A faint roar overbore the near sounds. It was the sea on the rocks two miles away. Suddenly the rain came, like goose-shot against the window, on the trees: the blast tore at the thatch. All through the night it continued until a gray dawn showed low clouds going over like the canvas of ancient galleons, windburst and tattered.

The next morning tons of seaweed--deep-sea plant, too--heaved and shuddered in the rockpools, while a belt of oil fuel lay on the sand with spars and planks. Had there been a wreck somewhere? No one knew. Certainly it looked as though a cargo had gone overboard, for from the headland one could see another black belt where the walls of gray-green water toppled in foam.

But the gulls? They had gone inland, right up the wide sandy estuary of the river. How did they know, so many hours before, that the storm was coming?

The more one thinks one knows of nature the more open should be the mind of the naturalist. I am learning, or should I say, unlearning?

A BIRD MYSTIC

Every year the ragtailed swallows are fewer, for many are destroyed as the hosts sweep southward in autumn, killed by electric wires on the Continent “for food” (I have seen them, with thrushes and blackbirds, laid out, pitifully small and gentle, in the Italian shop-windows--Nero in hell must be awfully pleased with this sure sign of degeneracy among the descendants of that race of which he declared himself to be “a genius.”)

In all the tallats[1] of my Devon village there were but four swallows’ nests during the summer of 1921. There are over fifty tallats. Under the rafters are the ruins of nearly two hundred mud mansions--belonging to past summers. Some, indeed, are intact, others utilised by flycatchers, others have been selected by wrens for foundations of their domed nests. But only four are being used this year.

Although the swallows are becoming extinct the swifts are increasing. I have met many people who do not know one bird from the other. Yet it is easy to tell.

The swift is the mystic among birds. He is aloof from other birds--apart from life. He is never seen to perch unless it be on the rigging of a ship during migration. The swift is black, he screams shrilly as he darts through the air, his wings are curved like a boomerang. During June I have seen and heard them long after midnight, whole cohorts of them wheeling in the sky, their cries sounding like the thin jingle of a frail chain. I verily believe that some remain on the wing (not the brooding females, of course) from dawn till dawn. They pass my cottage door a foot away from my head, their wings hissing. Under the ancient thatch they nest, plunging, it seems, straight into the holes. This is necessary, because a swift clings with difficulty; for some reason all its four toes are in front of the foot. Through the dark holes they creep, to reach the nests of saliva, cobwebs, and straw-speck laid like a mouldered saucer on the lath and plaster.

One midsummer eve a great commotion brought me to my doorway. I looked out and saw about half a hundred swifts pursuing a great barn owl, white and slow-fanning, holding in one dropped foot a limp rat. The owls are nesting on the lath and plaster of my cottage, but they do not interfere with the swifts.