THE SHORES. DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES.

Previous

I have frequently observed, in my days of sadness, a being sadder still, which Melancholy might have chosen for its symbol: I mean, the Dreamer of the Marshes, the meditative bird that, in all seasons, standing solitarily before the dull waters, seems, along with his image, to plunge in their mirror his monotonous thought.

His noble ebon-black crest, his pearl-gray mantle—this semi-royal mourning contrasts with his puny body and transparent leanness. When flying, the poor heron displays but a couple of wings; low as is the elevation to which he rises, there is no longer any question of his body—he becomes invisible. An animal truly aerial, to bear so light a frame, the heron has enough, nay, he has a foot too many; he folds under his wing the other; and nearly always his lame figure is thus defined against the sky in a fantastical hieroglyph.

Whoever has lived in history, in the study of fallen races and empires, is tempted to see herein an image of decay. Yonder bird is a great ruined lord, a dethroned king, or I am much mistaken. No creature issues from Nature's hands in so miserable a condition. Therefore I ventured to interrogate this dreamer, and I said to him from a distance the following words, which his most delicate hearing caught exactly:—"My fisher-friend, wouldst thou oblige me by explaining (without abandoning thy present position), why, always so melancholy, thou seemest doubly melancholy to-day? Hath thy prey failed thee? Have the too subtle fish deceived thine eyes? Does the mocking frog defy thee from the bottom of the waters?"

"No; neither fish nor frogs have made sport of the heron. But the heron laughs at himself, despises himself, when he remembers the glory of his noble race, and the bird of the olden times.

"Thou wouldst know wherefore I dream? Ask the Indian chief of the Cherokees, or the Iowas, why for long days he leans his head upon his hand, marking on the tree before him an object which was never there?

"The earth was our empire, the realm of the aquatic birds in the Transitional age when, young and fresh, she emerged from the waters. An era of strife, of battle, but of abundant subsistence. Not a heron then but earned his life. There was need neither to attack nor pursue; the prey hunted the hunter; it whistled, or it croaked on every side. Millions of creatures of undefined natures, bird-frogs, winged fish, infested the uncertain limits of the two elements. What would ye have done, ye feeble mortals, the latest-born of the world? The Bird prepared earth for ye. Colossal encounters were waged against the enormous monster-births of the ooze; the son of air, the bird, attaining the dimensions of an Anak, shrunk not from battle with the giant. If your ungrateful histories have not traced these events, God's grand record narrates them in the depths of the earth, where she deposits the conquered and the conquerors, the monsters exterminated by us, and we who have exterminated them.

"Your lying myths make us contemporaries of a human Hercules. What had his club availed against the plesiosaurus? Who would have met, face to face, the horrible leviathan? The capacity of flight was absolutely needed, the strong intrepid wing which from the loftiest height bore downwards the Herculean bird, the epiornis, an eagle twenty feet in stature, and fifty feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, the implacable hunter, who, lord of three elements, in the air, in the water, and in the deep slime, pursued the dragon with ceaseless hostility.

"Man had perished a hundred times. Through our agency man became possible on a pacified earth. But who will be astonished that these awful wars, which lasted for myriads of years, spent the conquerors, wearied the winged Hercules, transformed him into a feeble Perseus, a pale and lustreless memory of our heroic times?

"Lowered in strength and stature, but not in heart, famished by our very victory, by the disappearance of evil races, by the division of the elements which held our prey concealed at the bottom of the waters, we in our turn were hunted upon the earth, in the forests and the marsh, by those new-comers who, without our help, had never been. The malice and dexterity of the woodman were fatal to our nests. Like a coward, in the thick of the branches which impede flight and shackle combat, he laid his hand on our young ones. A new war, and a less fortunate one, this, which Homer calls the War of the Pigmies and the Cranes. The lofty intelligence of the cranes, their truly military tactics, have not prevented man their enemy from gaining the advantage by a thousand execrable arts. Time was on his side, and earth, and nature: she moves forward, drying up the earth, exhausting the marshes, narrowing the undefined region where we reigned. It will be with us, in the end, as with the beaver. Many species perish: another century, perhaps, and the heron will have lived."

The story is too true. Except those species which have taken their side, have abandoned earth, have given themselves up frankly and unreservedly to the liquid element; except the divers, the cormorant, the wise pelican, and a few others, the aquatic tribes seem in a state of decay. Restlessness and sobriety maintain them still. It is this persistent anxiety which has gifted the pelican with a peculiar organ, hollowing for her under her distended beak a movable reservoir, a living sign of economy and of attentive foresight.

Others, skilful voyagers, like the swan, live by constantly changing their abode. But the swan herself, which, though uneatable, is trained by man on account of her beauty and her grace—the swan, formerly so common in Italy, and to which Virgil so constantly refers, is now very rare there. In vain the traveller would seek for those snow-white flotillas which covered with their sails the waters of the Mincio, the marshes of Mantua; which mourned for PhaËton in despite of his sisters, or in their sublime flight, pursuing the stars with harmonious song, repeated to them the name of Varus.[20]

That song, of which all antiquity speaks, is it a fable? These organs of singing, which are so largely developed in the swan, were they always useless? Did they never disport themselves in happy freedom when enjoying a more genial atmosphere, and spending the greater portion of the year in the mild climates of Greece and Italy? One might be tempted to believe it. The swan, driven back to the north, where his amours secure mystery and repose, has sacrificed his song, has gained the accent of barbarism, or become voiceless. The muse is dead; the bird has survived.

Gregarious, disciplined, full of tactic and resources, the crane, the superior type of intelligence among these species, might contrive, one would fancy, to prosper, and to maintain herself everywhere in her ancient royalty. She has lost two kingdoms, however: France, where she now only appears as a bird of passage; England, where she rarely ventures to deposit her eggs.

The heron, in the days of Aristotle, was full of industry and sagacity. The ancients consulted him in reference to fine weather or tempest, as one of the gravest of augurs. Fallen in the mediÆval days, but preserving his beauty, his heavenward flight, he was still a prince, a feudal bird; kings esteemed it kingly sport to hunt him, and considered him a meet quarry for the noble falcon. And so keenly was he hunted, that already, in the reign of Francis I., he had grown rare: that monarch lodged him near his own palace at Fontainebleau, and established there some heronries. Two or three centuries pass, and Buffon can still believe that there are no provinces in France where heronries could not be found. In our own days, Toussenel knows of but one in all the country—at least in its northern districts, in Champagne: a wood between Rheims and Epernay conceals the last asylum where the poor lonely bird still dares to hide his loves.

Lonely! In that lies his condemnation. Less gregarious than the crane, less domesticated than the stork, he seems to have grown harsh towards his progeny, towards the mate whom he loves. His brief rare fits of desire scarcely beguile him for a day from his melancholy. He cares little for life. In captivity he often refuses nourishment, and pines away without complaint and without regret.

The aquatic birds, creatures of great experience, for the most part reflective and learned in two elements, were, at their palmiest epoch, more advanced than many others. They well deserved the care of man. All of them possessed merits of diverse originality. The social instinct of the cranes, and their various imitative talent, rendered them amusing and agreeable. The joviality of the pelican, and his joyous humour; the tenderness of the goose, and his strong faculty of attachment; and, finally, the good disposition of the storks, their piety towards their aged parents, confirmed by so many witnesses, formed between this world and our own firm ties of sympathy, which human levity ought not barbarously to have rent asunder.

[Note.Heronries in England. The heron, though rare in England, is certainly not so scarce as he seems to be in France, perhaps because it is against the laws of sport to hunt him. In some districts the man who shot a heron would be regarded with as much scorn as if he had killed a fox. He is a very rapacious bird, and it is asserted that, on an average, he will destroy daily half a hundred small roach and dace.

There is a fine heronry at Cobham, near Gravesend, in Kent, the seat of the Earl of Darnley. Another, in Great Sowdens Wood, on the Rye road, one mile from Udimere, in Sussex, contains fully four hundred nests. That at Parham, the Hon. R. Curzon's beautiful seat has quite a history.

The original birds were brought from Wales to Penshurst, by the Earl of Leicester's steward, in the reign of James I. Thence, some two centuries later, they migrated to Michel Grove, at Angmering. It may be about twenty years since that the Duke of Norfolk caused two or three trees to be felled near their retreat, and the offended birds immediately commenced their migrations, and, in the course of three seasons, all assembled in Parham Woods. Here, in the thick shelter of pine and spruce-fir, are now about fifty-seven nests. (See Knox's "Ornithological Rambles in Kent and Sussex.")—Translator.]


THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Clyx.com


Top of Page
Top of Page