IF we had to distribute the Seasons among the birds that are called “British,” selecting a notable fowl to represent each, we could hardly overlook the claims of the cuckoo, the nightingale, and the swallow to distinction. But, after all, these are not “thorough Britons.” They only come to us for our summer, and when that goes they follow it. Though great numbers of them are British-born, they are at best only Anglo-Continental, Anglo-Asiatic, Anglo-African, and Inter-Oceanic. But our resourceful little islands give us native birds, all our own, that amply serve the Seasons, and represent, with sufficing charm, the changing Four. We have the thrush, the blackbird, the skylark, and the robin, four of the sweetest birds that the round world can show—

The thrush is pre-eminently our bird of spring. While the snow-drops, the “Fair Maids of February,” are still in early bloom, and before the crocus has lit its points of flame or the primrose its pale fires, and while “the daffodils that come before the swallow dares” are scarcely in their bud, the thrush has burst forth in full song, its burden the “news of buds and blossoming.” There is little that is green yet in copse and hedge: few flowers worth a child’s picking are to be seen. But he is too full of his glad evangel to be able to keep from singing, and from the tufted larch

Some naturalists want us to call it a migrant, and in proof of their argument, tell us of the multitudes that pass over Heligoland at a certain time of the year. But against this, let every one who has a garden where thrushes build, bear witness how, in the hardest winters, the dead birds are picked up among the laurels, starved or frozen to death. This alone demolishes the migrant theory. That numbers do leave England in winter may be true enough; it is the overflow of population.

Indeed, if the superfluous songsters did not go away (and the Wild Birds’ Protection Act remained in force), we should be smothered with thrushes. I know, for instance, of a little “place” in the country, some thirty acres all told, garden, shrubberies, orchards, spinneys, and meadow, where birds are tempted to come by the planting of fruit bushes and strawberry-beds in all directions, by the numbers of elder trees and mountain ash set out, by the encouragement of blackberries and dog-roses wherever they can be allowed to grow, and where birds are tempted to stay in winter by liberal scatterings of grain-foods and table-scraps. Within this little estate there were one year forty nests of thrush and blackbird. Now supposing these birds bred only once in the year, which is very improbable, and reared only three birds apiece, which is equally so, and that half were killed or died during the year, there would then be left twice as many thrushes as in the year before. Forty pairs would become eighty; eighty, a hundred and sixty; a hundred and sixty, three hundred and twenty, and so on till five years later there would be over ten thousand pairs of thrushes (allowing all along for the same excessive proportion of casualties), breeding on thirty acres, and if each pair hatched five birds, there would be fifty thousand thrushes all together!

So it is well that thoughtful Nature leads off vast colonies every year. Those that happen to stop to rest on Heligoland stop there for good and all, for the Heligolanders eat them. Those that get farther fare no better, for everybody eats them. Belgian and Dutchman, Frenchman, Spaniard and Portuguese, German, Swiss, Italian. And it is really a

mercy that they do. For if all the thrushes that leave us were to come back again, the consequences would be simply disastrous. Suppose all the human emigrants from Great Britain were to come back again! The population of these islands would be sitting three deep on top of one another.

No, the thrush is not a migrant in the sense that the nightingale is or the turtle-dove. By a wise dispensation of Nature the superfluous increment is drafted off annually. But the same number that sing in the garden in March sing every month in the year till March comes round again.

There is, I confess it, something very pleasing in the thought that a particular turtle-dove, all the time that it was enjoying itself in the palm-gardens by Cairo, or among the arbutus and olives of Athens, should keep in its memory a particular tree in my garden in England, and in spite of all temptations should come straight back to it every summer. For such fidelity I am cordially grateful, and I appreciate the dainty little bird’s soft purring in the copse all the better for its pretty compliment of remembrance.

So with the nightingale, that, out of all the whole world, prefers an old juniper near my house to nest in, and that sits and sings gloriously every night as if in requital of my hospitality. I am proud of the small brown bird’s preference for my garden over others, and proud of my neighbour’s envy, whose garden the nightingale—“dear angel of the Spring,” “the dearling of the somer’s pryde”—never visits. And I take care that the rites shall not be violated; that my guests shall never have cause to regret their choice.

But they cannot stay with us. They come when our daffodils are all abloom, and go when the roses are fading. It is a far cry from London to Magdala, but the nightingale goes away even farther than that, and then in the Spring it turns northward again, and, by-and-by, with myriads of other birds, comes back to us to find the lilacs in flower, and the home-staying thrush with young ones already in the nest.

And they come in strange company. Sometimes the wild swan, quite an island for the little birds, flies winnowing the air beside them; sometimes a flight of hawks, but with their minds too full of their journey to think of harming their small fellow-voyagers; always with the sound of a multitude about them, and the murmuring of innumerable wings. Pitch dark the night, but somewhere or another is a leader, and they follow, wild duck and swallow, sea-fowl and dove, broad-winged geese and tiny gold-crest wrens, an instinct-driven mob that, in spite of all perils of storm and of distance, keeps its course, with dogged courage, and steers straight for the land that is to be its summer home. Lighthouses have become our best observatories for these annual transits, and the descriptions that are given of the mobbing of the great sea-lanterns by the hurrying flights of strangely assorted birds, are so curious as to be scarcely credible. What they suppose it to be, this bright revolving light in the dark waste, we cannot of course tell; but they have learned by experience that it means that land is very near, and so they all swerve in their course to pass through its rays. And those who keep the lighthouses tell us of the streams of birds that pass, flashing white for an instant in the glare of the lamp and then disappearing, and of still larger companies that fly overhead and out of sight, filling the night-air with the sound of rushing wings and the clamour of different voices, “feeling for each other in the dark,” as Bunyan says, “with words.”

I had been telling a child about the miracle of migration, and when I had finished, she routed all my science by the simplest of questions, and utterly posed me by asking: “What do they do it for?” Yes, indeed, what do they do it for? or what do they do it for? It does not matter which word we put the emphasis on: it is the same conundrum always from a slightly different angle; only another turn in the maze. As the child got no reply, she helped herself to one, and satisfactorily remarked: “Perhaps they’ve got to.” She had gathered from my description that there could be nothing agreeable to the birds in the migration, and, logically enough, since one only does that which is disagreeable from necessity, she inferred compulsion. But she set me thinking, and since science attempts no explanation of this appalling Kismet of the birds, I tried to find a reason for it for myself. And there can only be this, that it is one of Nature’s methods for reducing numbers.

At any rate, wherever we turn our eyes in Nature, we find her bringing forth in vast excess of her requirements, and then restoring the equilibrium by the institution of active scourges, or terrific epidemics of suicide. There is no need for the birds to cross seas: to travel twice a year from the Hebrides to Abyssinia. Do they want a warmer climate? do they want a cooler? They have only to remain where they are and change their altitude. Do they need food? The idea is preposterous. They leave their various countries at seasons when their food is most abundant; they are then well fed, and are then strongest for the terrific ordeal before them. Besides, imagine a bird in, say Egypt, coming to England for food! No, that is the least reasonable of all explanations. And no other is much better. So we have to fall back on the child’s reason, “Perhaps they do it because they’ve got to.”

Twice in every year do they start off, these little

pilgrims, along the broad highways of massacre, walled in, as it were, with disaster on either side, running the gauntlet of ambush and open warfare all along the line. The myriads that perish before they reach us are beyond computation. But the survivors rear new broods, the gaps by death are all filled by birth, and off they go again once more, giving hostages to pitiless calamity, and strewing afresh in Autumn the tracks of Spring with countless corpses. But I did not tell the child this. She would have said the birds were “stupid,” and thought, perhaps, the less of them and the worse.

So before we had got home I told her that “perhaps” the reason why the birds all came to England to build their nests and lay their eggs here, was because they wanted their young ones to learn the best of manners and to go to the best of bird-schools. “Some of these birds come from countries where the people are called savages, because their behaviour is shocking, and they have no schools, and so (perhaps) the birds come here because they want the little ones to be nicely brought up.”

It is not much of a reason, I confess. It will not probably satisfy Professor Ptthmllnsprts. But it satisfied my small companion, for she approved the conduct of the old birds. And when you can satisfy a child on a point that you can not satisfy a grown-up person on, you have got some way, depend upon it, towards the truth. There must be some advantage in the migration of birds, or it would not happen with such pitiless regularity. But it does not look as if the advantage were on the side of the birds.

And now to get back to my thrush. When this bird was first identified with both throstle and “mavis” is a pretty point that some bird-lover might care to follow out. It certainly is quite of modern date, for I find Spenser making the mavis as one bird “reply” to the thrush as another; in poet-laureate Skelton’s poem the “threstill” is contrasted with the mavis—“the threstill with her warblynge, the mavis with her whistell”—and quite as explicitly in Gascoigne. Harrison, again, clearly distinguishes the two as being different birds. So that the thrush-throstle-mavis was not a single bird before, at any rate, the middle of the seventeenth century. And for myself, I should not be surprised if it were found on inquiry that the mavis was originally the blackbird, and that it is an old English word, and not a Scotch one, any more than “merle.” At any rate, this much is certain, that Chaucer’s English was “a well of English undefiled”; and he sings both of mavis and of merle as of birds that he knew. And in Chaucer’s day, Scotland was a fearsome region situated “in foreign parts,” and inhabited by a race of human beings who only differed from Irish in being worse. And Chaucer did not speak Scotch. But, as I have said, the origin of our bird-and-beast names is a very pretty subject still awaiting the philological naturalist, and when that curious person is forthcoming he ought to make his subject one of a very curious and lasting interest.

Meanwhile the thrush is with us, year in year out, singing whenever it can, and persecuting snails in the intervals. For though it is fond of worms, and dotes on the berries of the mountain-ash, it has a perfect passion for snails. If a thrush is in a bush in a garden, and you throw a snail on to the garden path close by it, the thrush is promptly out. The sound of the shell on the gravel attracts it at once, for it is familiar with it. In winter, when the snails have all cuddled up together in some corner behind the flower-pots, or between the pear-tree stem and the wall, the thrush finds them out, and so long as a snail remains the thrush will stop. Nor is it a shy bird when thus engaged, for if you come suddenly upon it, walking quietly on the snow, it will hop off with its victim a little way and begin again tapping the poor snail upon a stone, till the little householder is left without a wall to protect it, and is swallowed. And if a thrush finds a secluded corner with a convenient stone there, it always takes its snails to the same spot, building up in its own way a little shell-midden, like those which prehistoric man has left us, of oyster-shells and clams, to puzzle over. When driven by stress of weather to the seashore, it treats the hard-shelled whelks just as it treated the garden-snails, and by persistent rapping on the rocks, arrives at its food.

By nest, and, above all, by song, this bird is probably

the best known of all our birds. The blackbird is quite as familiar by sight and by song, but many who know what the mavis’ eggs and nests are like, would perhaps be puzzled to describe the merle’s. The home of the hedge-sparrow, again, is well known, and, after a fashion, its appearance; but how many who hear it singing know who the small musician is? So, taken all round, the thrush is the bird we are most intimate with. And how welcome it always is on the lawn, with its charming plumage, and its pretty, half-timid way of coming out into public! “I hope I am not in the way?” it seems to ask, as it hops quickly out from under the shrubs, and as suddenly stops. “May I? Thanks.” And out it hops a little further, and again stops. But why describe so well-known a favourite? Tennyson has put words to its song, and the better one knows the bird’s song, the more admirable the poet’s words appear.

And the thrush sings alike, with constantly changing cadences but with always equal melody, when the wind is blowing bitterly over the tree-tops, when rain is falling, when the night is dark. In winter the poor bird, diffident of its welcome, seldom comes to the door for alms when others come in crowds. So if you have a wish to be kind to it in its days of pinching want, scatter some food farther from the house, out of sight of it, and there, if you go cautiously, you may always see the starved thrushes gratefully accepting their little dues of crumb and meat.

The blackbird is the shadow of the thrush: you seldom see or hear one without the other: nor, indeed, is either of them often mentioned alone. Yet the blackbird is probably the more commonly seen. For one thing, it is a very conspicuous bird; for another, it is not so diffident as the thrush. It is the blackbirds that you see flying out of the cherry-trees and strawberry-beds, but if you set nets for the marauders, as I did one year to stock an aviary, you catch quite as many mavises as merles. The former, it is said, are among the fruit “looking for worms,” but I doubt it. They are not so bold in their depredations as their black cousins, but I fancy they are more sly. Blackbirds will fly away with a cherry in their beaks or a strawberry without any affectation of innocence: the thrush, when startled, goes off “empty-handed.” But throw down a handful of fruit, especially raspberries, in an aviary, go aside and watch which bird is first at the feast—it is the thrush.

The blackbird and thrush are really two birds of very dissimilar character: the same traps will not succeed as well with one as with the other, nor is it so easy to rear the former as the latter. Country people declare that the mothers poison their young ones when caged, and a poet says:

Whatever foundation there may be for the belief, I found that if I caged a nest of blackbirds (leaving the cage in the bush and the top open for the parents to go in and out), the old birds would visit the nest, presumably with food, with the greatest diligence, but the young birds would be dying in two days. The thrushes kept their young ones alive.

Where do our blackbirds go to? They rear in nearly every case two broods a year; that is to say, there are every year five times as many blackbirds as the year before. According to this, starting with a single pair, a garden ought to have at the end of five years fourteen hundred, and at the end of ten years, supposing that one half died each year, something over two million blackbirds. Or, supposing they only rear one brood, there would be over seven thousand. Suppose the cats eat six thousand, there would still be the preposterous number of a thousand left. Where, then, I ask, do all the blackbirds go? It is quite certain that each pair, as a rule, hatches five birds, yet the number of blackbirds does not increase. So that if we say there are only ten thousand pairs of blackbirds in Great Britain, there are at least fifty thousand killed or made away with every year. “Then, what are they hatched for?” my child-friend might ask. “For cats” would be my reply. And yet it seems absurd that a hundred thousand blackbirds should be hatched every year just for cats to eat. All of which is a mystery to me.

It is noteworthy of this charming bird that it is an emblem of cultivation, as the sparrow is of civilisation. Savages only are exempt from the sparrow: only barren land from the blackbird. As soon as a garden is laid out, a hedge set, an orchard planted, the blackbird comes. Except within easy flight of land that man has tended, it is not found. Its nest, again, has a curious point in its favour, for it is so well built—being a cup of mud strongly felted with moss and grass both inside and out—and, as a rule, in such a sheltered spot that it lasts through the winter, and mice are often glad, when their tenements underground become uncomfortable, to occupy them. At other times, too, they serve them admirably for store-rooms and larders. One blackbird’s nest that I knew of, built into some very dense ivy in an angle of a wall, was a squirrel’s garden-house; not its regular home, for that was up in the pine-tree overhead, but a pleasure retreat for empty hours. But a vagabond rat turned it out, and made a “doss-house” of it.

The blackbird’s song everybody knows, but I have found that only the closer observers of Nature have noticed how it differs from that of other birds. Michael Drayton was, I think, the first:

The old English somewhat obscures the meaning, which is, that while all other birds “sing” with their throats, the blackbird alone “plays” upon a pipe. This “dulcet pipe” occurs in other poets, and two or three, Wordsworth, for instance, speak of “blackbird pipers.” It is almost the only bird said to “whistle” and to “flute.” The distinction is just, for it is, I think, the only European songster whose melody so curiously suggests artificial assistance. No voice is so completely a bird’s voice as the nightingale’s, but the blackbird, when at its best, is the master playing on some exquisite instrument. So the ear that has once distinguished the difference can never mistake the blackbird for the thrush. It is, too, perhaps the only bird that sings its best in captivity. There used to be one in an inn in Epping Forest that outsang all the wild birds within hearing.

Why do caged birds sing, if singing is the expression of happiness and joy? That human beings should, by the exercise of reason, or the growth of new interests, by the lapse of time, or the consolations of religion, recover, after a severe blow, their original serenity and even light-heartedness, is sufficiently intelligible. But what would the world say of any bridegroom, torn away from the arms of his bride, and shut up in a kennel; or of a young father kidnapped in the bosom of his young family, and ignominiously imprisoned in a fowl-run, who should straightway behave himself with the utmost gaiety, and exhibit to passers-by every symptom of happiness? Yet this is what the blackbird, caught in full song during the pairing season, does. He goes on singing just as if nothing had happened. It may be, of course, that the brief days of moping through which the poor bird passes, correspond to long years of human sorrowing, and that then hope revives, and the blackbird, remembering how song used to be “once upon a time” associated with all the joys of home and home-life, thinks that if he only sings long enough and well enough, they may all come back again. But surely there cannot be any happiness in that happy-sounding song?

Love-notes of birds are generally unmusical and often grotesque. When they are pretty they are monosyllabic. So the emotions that prompt lengthened melody are, as a rule, the sterner and unamiable. Anger, defiance, pride and possessiveness supply the motives of their songs.

When a lion is amiable, he is quiet; his loudest utterance is a yawn; when courting, he grunts and hiccoughs; when aggressive or inclined to assert himself, “just to let Africa know” as it were, he opens upon the world with the artillery of his voice. Is that the lion’s way of “singing”? and is the blackbird’s song its way of “roaring”?

To take a more familiar case, it is only when the animal is in the presence of his own sex, and his intentions are the reverse of friendly, that the human understanding arrives at the vocal compass of domestic tom-cats. They then sing melancholy part-songs, out of all time and tune: we call them “cats’ concerts.” But if you will listen to them, and not disturb them either by laughter or missiles (as your humour may take you), you will observe that each cat is “singing” its very best. Very often no scrimmage results after the music is over, but each cat, satisfied with its exhibition of its upper register, goes its way. If, while listening, you can also see the cats while they are singing, you can have no more doubt as to their own opinion of their performances than when watching a blackbird. Female cats cannot sing. That fine voice is an ornament of the male sex alone, and whenever one male meets another—none of the other sex being present—they at once (if sudden conflict, giving no time for a “glee,” does not supervene) fall to singing, each pitting his “g” against the other’s. You may any day see two such encounterers, having sung their songs, relapse into placid indifference to each other’s presence, just as blackbirds do, and depart harmlessly each about his own duties.

Lions sing much as blackbirds do. Morning and evening they get on to an eminence and lift up their voices, informing all the other lions in their parish, and the continents adjoining, that they are going to bed or have just got up, and that they do not intend to stand any nonsense; that that particular eminence is their own, and no other lion in Lybia or thereabouts will be tolerated in its vicinity. If, while one is roaring, there should come rumbling along on the wind the voice of another, the vocal duet is prolonged; but when the rites have been duly performed, “matin-song and vespers eke,” they go about the business of the day or the night, as the case may be, without further ado.

So, again, in the ferocious old European fighting-days, warriors were perpetually singing—not love songs, for these were delegated to professionals and mercenaries, but war-chaunts. Heroes of the Berserker and hardy Norseman type got up and sang whenever they were excited, as naturally as blackbirds do, but their singing must have been much more like the lion’s than the bird’s. Savage races at the present day, whenever they are unamiably inclined, fall to “singing” war-songs, which they improvise, music and words alike; and to our ears their compositions are hideous. So, no doubt, the blackbird would think the lion’s, and the lion think the blackbird’s. Birds and beasts, no doubt, differ as much in ear as they do in voice. But reverse their sizes, and see the result. The emu bellows and booms; there are mice that “sing” quite prettily. If the lion were the size of a blackbird, he would, perhaps, as Bottom said, “roar you as gently as any sucking-dove: roar you as ’twere any nightingale.”

Voice alone does not make a bird a favourite, or what could we say for the swallow, that has so slight a song, and yet, excepting the robin, is

In the old days Rome loved the swallows as the spirits of dead children revisiting their homes, and Rhodes welcomed the bird’s return with public song and canticles of thanks. And long before Rome and Rhodes, men said that it was the swallow that brought Noah back the leaf; and the swallow, when Adam and Eve were separated after the Flood, brought our first parents together again, by telling Adam in Serendib that Eve was on the Red Sea coast. In later days it is a sacred bird in all four quarters of Europe: “the bird of consolation” in the North; “bird of the happy beak” in the South; “the bird of the hearth” in the West; and “the bird of God” in the East. Apart from all this, “the clime-changing swallow,” slipt from the secret hand of Providence, that comes all the way from Southern Africa to hunt our May-flies, is one of the oracles of Nature and the joyous evangelist of happy Summer.

We all notice the first swallow almost as soon as the first cuckoo; for though the one bird’s note catches the ear, the flight of the other arrests the eye as certainly. And what a flight it is! Has it ever been computed how many hundred miles it flies every day? For hours they are on the wing, flying at the rate of a mile a minute, and always with exquisite grace. Watch a bird crossing a hay-field, winding in and out of the hay-cocks, rising just sufficiently to clear the hedge at the bottom, wheeling round over the gate, and then up the lane, almost, so it seems, skimming the ground as it goes, and yet without an effort lifting itself up over the spinney, and so dropping back into the hay-field. Their judgment is so accurate that they never have to turn at an angle, but, always allowing for the curve beforehand, make their course with a beautifully easy sweep. When there are young ones to feed their speed is even swifter, their industry more untiring, for instead of breaking off in their insect hunting to circle in play with their fellows, or to race the swifts across the sky, they have only the one idea, to fill their beaks as full as they will hold, and hurry back to the nest.

The swallow does not go back to its young with a single fly at a time, but with a mouth filled as full as possible, so that those who try to calculate the usefulness of this bird by the number of the journeys that it makes to its nest, underestimate its destruction of insects by probably fifty per cent. Although, perhaps, few who watch the birds know it, the swallow’s wide-gaping mouth is sticky inside, so that everything it catches it holds, and in this way is spared interminable miles of journeying. To see them at their best is when a hawk passes, and, for sheer mischief, the swallows chase it.

The hawk is flying, as hawks can fly, with great swiftness; but look at the velocity of the swallows, which fly round and round the hawk as it goes! They hover over it, loiter by the side of it, make excursions ahead of it, and come back, mock it, in fact, as if it were an owl, or as hares might mock and mob a tortoise. And the hawk never even pretends to chase one of the swallows, but goes doggedly on its way, as fast as it can go, to the cover of the wood. To see the swallow at its worst is upon the ground: there it is a poor thing indeed, and from the shortness of its legs and the length of its wings, has to shuffle along, rather than walk.

But it does not often condescend to walk on the ground. When it alights, to knead the plaster for its nest at a puddle’s edge, or for any other purpose, it springs up into the air from the spot on which it settled. And its nest once built, it has no reason for coming to the ground at all. It does so from choice sometimes, where it suspects insects are congregated, or sometimes to drink, but, as a rule, it both eats and drinks on the wing. When it rests, it is on a house-roof, a railing, or dead branch, and often when thus seated it sings a very sweet, simple little song, loud enough to puzzle the passer-by, who can hear but not see the songster, and pretty enough to astonish those who imagine that swallows only twitter.

While the hen-bird is brooding she is busily fed by her mate, and the compliments that pass whenever the two birds meet are very sweet to listen to.

Every time he comes there is a scrap of conversation, and when she has eaten what he has brought, there is a little exchange of twittered love-nothings. There are always two broods in the year, the first scattering over the country and eventually straggling away in small migratory parties across the sea, the second going with their parents in the great annual exodus in October.

It is then that these birds congregate in vast companies, lining the telegraph-wires for miles, till they loop with their weight, or crowding upon every available foothold of some range of buildings. How irresistible the discipline of these little creatures is, as you look at them sitting there by the thousand, waiting for the signal to start on a journey the object and end of which is a mystery to all the young ones. You will see how impatient they are, how they keep on trying their wings by wheeling round in the air. With what restlessness they take short flights and resettle. And all this time, and up to the very last, the old ones keep on busily feeding the young, as if they knew what a trial was before them, and how urgent their need of all the strength possible. Here and there are broods hatched too young to join in the great Hegira, and here and there nestlings with some infirmity that unfits them for boisterous travel. These are found lingering in our islands all through October into November, but the great army of the swallows musters at the rendezvous punctually to date. And there they sit in their myriads, but the whole obedient as one, and lo! next morning, before the sun is up, they are gone, every one of them—gone towards the sea, towards the Nile and the Cape, gone till next Spring. For