verandah, much tried by a plague of flies; it was clear that “the blood of an Englishman” attracted whole swarms of midges and other unwelcome visitors. As soon as the house-martins became aware of this fact, they drew nearer and nearer to us in their long curves of flight, swooping down upon the insects attracted by our presence before they had time to arrive at the verandah. We sat quite still, taking no notice of the friendly birds’ manœuvres; till after a while they mustered up courage to come close to our faces, flying so low and approaching us so boldly, that we might almost have put out our hands and caught them. I am aware, of course, that the martins merely regarded us from the selfish point of view, as fine bait for midges; while we in return were glad to accept their services as vicarious flycatchers. But on what else are most human societies founded save such mutual advantage? And do we not often feel real friendship for those who serve us for hire well and faithfully? In the midst of so much general distrust of man, I accept with gratitude the confidence of the house-martins.
All members of the British swallow-kind are amply represented in and about our three acres. The common swallows breed under the thatched eaves of the ruined shed in the Frying Pan, and hawk all day over the shallow trout-stream that bickers down its middle. You can tell them on the wing by their very forked tail. It is, I think, in part a distinguishing mark by which they recognize their own kind, and discriminate it from the martins; for the outer-tail feathers are particularly long and noticeable in the male birds, whence I take them to be of the nature of attractive ornaments. At the beginning of the breeding season, too, the males assume a beautiful pinky blush on the lighter parts of the plumage, which may specially be observed as they turn flashing for a moment in bright April sunshine. The sand-martins, again, the engineers of their race, have excavated their long tunnelled nests in the crumbling yellow cliff that flanks the cutting on the high road opposite; I love to see them fly in with unerring aim at the narrow mouth as they return all agog from their aërial hunting expeditions on cool summer evenings. They are the smallest and dingiest of our swallows; they have no sheeny blue-black plumage like their handsome cousins, but are pale brown above, and dirty white below. The house-martin, last of all, can be recognized at once upon the wing by his conspicuous belt of pure white plumage, almost dazzling in its brilliancy, which stretches in a band across the lower half of his back; as he pirouettes on the wing, this badge of his kind gleams for a moment against the sky, and then fades as if by magic. His shorter tail scarcely shows forked at a distance, but when you watch him at close quarters, it is delightful to observe how he broadens or narrows it as he flies, to steady and steer himself. In order fully to appreciate this point, however, you must have the quick keen eye of the born observer. As for the pure black swifts – those canonical birds that haunt the village steeple – they are not swallows at all, but dark and long-winged northern representatives of the humming-birds and trogons. All these alike are summer migrants in England, for they can but come to us when insects on the wing are cheap and plentiful.
IV.
A NEIGHBOURLY GOSSIP
I love gossip. For my own part, I can never see the point of the objections which some people raise against talking over the concerns of your neighbours’ families. They are always so interesting. I like to know all about them. I like to pry into their most intimate secrets. I like to find out what they do with themselves all day long; and what they have to eat for dinner; and how they make their living; and where or in whose company they spend their evenings. I like to watch where they build their homes, and how many eggs they lay, and how they hatch them out, and what becomes of the fledgelings. I like to spy out where others hibernate in the woods, and what store of nuts and fruits they have laid by to provide against the Christmas scarcity. You may think this sort of Paul Pry interest in the affairs of your fellow-creatures is undignified and unphilosophic; but I confess, to me it appears only neighbourly.
For example, there are my friends the missel-thrushes, who have just lately returned for the winter months to their commodious quarters in the hanger below me. A week or two since I noticed them flying home to the woods and parks in their thousands. They have been spending the summer months as usual on their moors in Norway; but food having lately begun to fail them on the fjelds, they are coming back now in great straggling flocks to their English residences. For, unlike the song-thrush, who is one of their closest and most distinguished relations, they stay with us in the winter only, and move north again betimes in late spring, as soon as their broods are reared and whortleberries are getting plentiful in the northern moorlands.
Questions of commissariat, indeed, have most to do with the migrations of birds; it is not weather, as weather, but the condition of the food-supply that mainly regulates their periodical movements. Now, the missel-thrush is almost entirely vegetarian in his habits; whereas his cousin, the song-thrush, subsists for the most part on a regimen of worms and other miscellaneous unsavoury animals. Hence it follows, of course, that the missel-thrush must needs go where berries are in season; he follows them closely across the face of Europe, from province to province. He cannot stand great cold, however, and often freezes to death in severe winters; which is another reason why he comes south for warmth when Norwegian hills rise white with snow, and fjords are blocked with ice, and crystal-frosted pine-trees glisten in the sun with innumerable diamonds. Family parties of missel-thrushes may be seen in our fields the whole winter through; but they are timid and wary, and fly off in a body at the faintest suspicion of coming danger. You can tell them as they rise on the wing by the conspicuous white patch under the pinions, which seems, like the rabbit’s tail, to act as a danger-signal to the rest of the household. No sooner does one of them scent a stranger afar off than he rises silently, and the others, alarmed by his contagious fear, rise after him one by one in a picturesque line, somewhat as one often sees in the case of wild-fowl. In February and March your missel-thrush begins to build in the hawthorns and apple-trees; and the moment his nestlings are strong enough of wing to buffet the strong winds of the German Ocean, the whole family flits north again to its Norwegian estate for the cloudberry season. The nests, however, though built somewhat overtly on bare and leafless boughs, are most difficult to find; for the cunning little architects, knowing well they will get no protection from a canopy of foliage, conceal their homes adroitly with an outer coat of woven moss and lichen, which so harmonizes with the grey and lichen-covered branches around them as to make them almost indistinguishable. The eggs are stone-grey, daintily spotted and blotched with round blobs of brown ochre.
But by far the most interesting point about the missel-thrush is that curious connection between the bird and the mistletoe which was observed so long since even by our prehistoric ancestors as to have given the species its vernacular name in all European languages. Turdus viscivorus – the mistletoe-eating thrush – is Linnæus’s scientific Latin title for the creature, and he well deserves it. He is almost or altogether the only bird that will eat the mistletoe berries, and on him accordingly the mistletoe depends for the dispersal of its seeds and the propagation of its mystic parasitic seedlings. The berries themselves are very “viscid,” as we say – the word itself being derived from the Latin name of mistletoe – and the seeds cling close, as if gummed or glued, to the bird’s beak and feet in a disagreeable fashion. So, to get rid of them, he alights on an apple-tree or a poplar, which are his favourite perches, betakes him at once to an angle of a bough, and rubs off the annoying and sticky objects in the fork of the branches. There they fasten themselves and germinate. Now, this arrangement exactly suits the mistletoe, for apple and poplar are just the two trees best adapted for its depredations, while a fork in a bough is the one likely place where it has a chance of rooting itself. A great many unobservant people imagine to-day that mistletoe grows chiefly on oaks, because they have heard about the sanctity of oak-grown mistletoes in the eyes of the Druids. The real fact is, as you may learn for yourself if you will look at nature instead of merely reading about it at second or third hand, that mistletoe on an oak-tree is extremely rare; the Druids prized it because they thought it the life or soul of the oak, which was the sacred tree of Celtic mythology. I notice, indeed, that missel-thrushes very seldom perch on oaks; and even when they do by chance dislodge a stray seed of mistletoe on one, it has difficulty in fixing its young suckers on the alien bark, and draining the tree’s nutritious juices. The truth is, the mistletoe and the missel-thrush are developed for one another; they have struck
