ONCE upon a time rooks were called crows, and as the latter had a very evil reputation, the former suffered for it. Nor is the confusion still extinct, for unfortunately there are obstinate people in the world who will not understand that it makes any difference whether they use a right name or a wrong one. It will be very long before the water-vole ceases to be called a water-rat; but until that time comes, an innocent animal will continue to be persecuted for a guilty one. So with the honest rooks. There are plenty of people who insist on calling them crows, and having given the bird a bad name proceed to hang him up as a “scare-crow” to warn his useful relatives off the field which they would otherwise rid of wire-worms and grubs.

That rooks do some mischief is beyond doubt. When the ground is frost-bound, and it cannot persecute the farmer’s

enemies that hide in the soil, the rook will feed on turnips. When the potatoes are coming on, the rooks go down between the hills prodding in the earth for the worms and larvÆ that assemble to eat the young tubers, and, it may be, eating many of them themselves. When hens’ eggs are left undefended the rook will carry them off. But how very trifling such damage is as compared with the good that is done by this hard-working bird. I have myself allowed an acre of potatoes to swarm day after day with rooks, and when the crop was gathered it was a first-rate one. After that one experience, and the absolute proof of the innocence of those rooks when in my potato-field, I need hardly say that when any farmer complains, or scientist asserts, that these birds do injury to potatoes when growing, I know he is saying “the thing that is not.” I have also had eggs stolen by rooks from a nest that a vagabond fowl had made for herself in the tall meadow-grass. But was the rook to blame? Certainly not. What right has a hen to go and lay her eggs in a meadow, carefully hiding them from her friends in the tall grass, but leaving them conspicuously exposed to every bird that flies over them? As for its depredation on turnips, what difference in the amount of sheep-food do the rooks’ pilferings make in a twenty-acre crop? Instead of grumbling, the intelligent farmer should scatter a barrow-load or two of mangolds conspicuously over the field for the frozen-out birds to eat at their comfort and to keep them from pecking the crops.

Indeed, there is scarcely any other bird that has more claims upon the agriculturist’s goodwill. From sunrise to sunset rooks are always at work, following the farmer’s men wherever they are disturbing the ground, and exterminating insects that are thus exposed. At other times they are patrolling the meadows, going over every foot of ground with extraordinary patience, and we may be sure that nothing that moves escapes their keen inquisitorial eye. When the nests are filled with young ones, the destruction of insect life must be prodigious, for rooks are large birds, and the voracity of the nestlings is enormous. But so long as people will call them crows, and as the immemorial infamy of that name clings to it, so long will the unfortunate birds be persecuted.

Yet in downright industry the farmer has few such friends, or the insect-world such foes. Up in the morning, before the dew is off the grass, before the lark is in the sky, the rooks are hard at work, disposing of the “first worm” and of the winded things of sunshine, which, clogged with moisture, are unable to rise from the ground. As soon as the men are afield, the rooks go to them, following them up and down with unwearying diligence, and tracking the plough, the harrow, and the spade, with the fierce unsparing scrutiny of inquisitors. There is no appeal from them. They hold their court upon the spot, and the summary procedure of their penal code is the same for all malefactors alike.

In another respect, this hard-living bird is deserving of regard, for it prefers the vicinity of human dwellings, and likes to live as near man as possible. Next to a heronry the existence of a rookery is always considered to add a charm to an estate, and not without reason, for, besides investing the place with a fine air of undisturbed ancestral repose, there is something very pleasant and soothing in the clamour of rooks in the peopled elms. To those who care to watch them, the burghers of these “airy cities” are a very entertaining folk. All through the winter, individuals, or small parties visit their nests, just as if they came to inspect and report upon the condition of “their wicker eyries,” and in February these visits become very frequent, the earlier birds pilfering from other nests to add to and strengthen their own. By-and-by the whole community begins to assemble, and the rookery is in most amusing uproar all day, for, for some extraordinary reason, they will not leave each other’s nests alone, but for the sake of one paltry twig, will lay themselves open to retaliations, which result in the entire wrecking of their nests by outraged neighbours, who, though they are so noisily indignant at the thefts of others, are themselves each in turn soon after caught stealing and punished.

And yet somehow or another the nests, in spite of ruinous altercations, manage to get finished, and as soon as eggs are laid, the republic is as orderly as could be expected. But even then, no nest is left undefended. In due course the young rooks are hatched, and the truly terrible task of feeding five mouths is imposed upon the parents. But by constant industry they fulfil their duties, and by the end of April, or early in May, the nestlings scramble off their nests on to the boughs, and by feeble flutterings from point to point, keeping close to their nest all the time, practise and strengthen their wings. Their first flight to the ground is a sight to watch, for the youngsters are very nervous, and the old bird’s patience is sometimes so sorely tried that, having coaxed them to fly in vain, she pushes them off the branch at last. Once on the ground they soon learn what to eat, and how to find it; but the instinct to go to the parents for food is so absurdly persistent, that you may often see a rook that looks as big as its mother, hurriedly gobbling up its own worm, in order to go and ask its mother for hers. And the gravity with which the old bird swallows the worm herself, and then turns to the overgrown young one, with a “Don’t you wish you may get it, my dear?” is delightful. So tenacious are these birds of their old haunts that they are still to be found building in the central postal district of London, although the steady growth of the city makes the distances they have to fly for food longer and longer every year, while the perils they have to encounter on the way, telegraph and telephone wires, are annually accumulating. But there they are, in spite of growing London, and are the very first to bring the news to the city that spring is coming in the country.

Long after the rook, the thrush, and blackbird have told us of the change of season, “the vernal cuckoo” comes shouting “the same song to sing.” There is no parable in Nature so hard to interpret as this bird which the ancients, themselves puzzled, placed on the sceptre of Juno and the shoulder of Venus. The poet who hesitated to call it a bird—

was not in doubt without reason. For it is, indeed, a mystery. Without a single “domestic” instinct, dividing its affections among all the mates it meets, making no nest, caring for no young, leaving the country as it came, without kith and kin, it is a bird to wonder at and to puzzle over. How comes it that it lays so small an egg, and so coloured that it can leave it in little birds’ nests without exciting their suspicion? and what law in Nature makes the small foster-parents so idolise

the little assassin who murders their young that they abandon their own nestlings to their fate without, apparently, any compunction, and concentrate their affection and their pride upon the solitary monster that is left, the destroyer of the rest? And even when the thing has grown so big that its open mouth is almost large enough to engulf its foster-parents, they go on feeding it and following it about as if fascinated by the wretch. Those who wish us to find “sermons in stones, and good in everything,” must surely hesitate when they come to look for a moral in the joyous life of the “plain-song cuckoo gray.” That it eats hairy caterpillars which no other bird dares to swallow for fear of choking, is certainly a point in its favour, and its ever-welcome “spring-delighting” voice is another. But neither its song, “its two old notes,” nor its consumption of “woolly bears,” gives human reason a sufficient explanation of its unique iniquity, or justifies its gay enjoyment of a life of perpetual summer without any responsibilities. The Psalmist, seeing “the wicked flourish,” broke out into bitter song; so might the poor hedge-sparrow and the pipit.

With the cuckoo come many birds from abroad, and all of them welcome, for they fill our gardens and woodlands with varied song, and wage unremitting war upon our insect pests.

There are not, probably, many people who notice either their coming or their going, for spring and winter are supposed to be sufficient explanation in themselves for the commencement and cessation of song. Even those who have gardens do not always notice the little singing-birds from abroad, for their plumage is very modest in colour, their habits are shy and retiring, and their songs always sung from the cover of some brake of fern or bramble, some sequestered corner where only the vagabond butterfly catches sight of them as it goes flickering to and fro in its quest of flowers.

Both garden-warbler and blackcap are more often heard than seen, and their song, by those who have never heard the nightingale, is regularly mistaken for that bird’s. Indeed, when two blackcaps are singing against each other, the alternating songs seem continuous, and the strength of the voice and the extreme beauty of their notes arrest the ear at once, while, being so unlike the song of either blackbird or thrush, which are heard as a rule only from tops of trees, the music is at once called the nightingale’s. Or how many of us notice the woodlark (a bird that stays with us all the winter through), even though its song is finer than the skylark’s?

On the wing, no doubt, it is mistaken for “the lark,” but when singing, especially at night, in the shrubbery or copse, as often for the nightingale; yet it is common enough, and if those who care to do so will, when they hear its exquisite song, stop and look round for the singer, they will see, sitting on a branch, a bird just like the skylark, but will notice, if they listen, that its voice is richer and its notes more varied than the laverock’s, and that the bird shifts from one perch to another while it is singing, sometimes even mounting to the top of a tree, and thence, still in song, flying up into the air to circle. If you startle a skylark it will never, you will notice, fly to woodland for shelter, but only to another part of the meadow or into the next, and settle there on the ground, so that whenever a bird that you think is a “lark” flies on being startled into a tree, you may be sure it is the “soft enamoured woodlark”—next to the nightingale the sweetest minstrel of the copse.

A skylark, as every one knows, sings, as a rule, when in the air, but it, too, will sing upon the ground; and in its cage, forgetful apparently of its captivity, pours out its song with the same enchanting gaiety as when it is free of all the sky.

As seen in Nature, there can be nothing imagined more exultant, more heartily joyous, than the glad, eager way in which the skylark seems to spring up from the meadow and commence its artless canticles of praise as thanks for its happiness and freedom. Yet, perched upon a scrap of turf, in a cage so low-roofed that it cannot attempt to rise, it sings the same “strains of unpremeditated art” that so charmed the great poet, and live for ever in his deathless verse. Even in winter, on a sunny day, the lark will soar up into the air “like an embodied joy whose race is just begun,” and “shower a rain of melody.” For some stay with us all the year round, though most of their companions go, and in such vast flocks that fifteen thousand have been caught in a single night out of a flight passing a single spot. And, poor little birds, wherever they rest on their journey they find nets spread for them, for every nation alike is agreed that larks are good to eat; and so they go, to and fro, literally “larding the earth” with their bodies. Yet in spite of these periodical massacres, and in spite of perennial persecution for the cage and the table, their numbers never seem to lessen, and our skies and meadows are as full of them one year as another. And it is well that it is so, for what should we miss more in a country walk than “the lark’s blithe carol from the clouds”?

Yet, introduced into New Zealand, they have become a pest, ravaging the cornfields when the blade first appears above ground, and pulling up, grain by grain, every plant in the field. The goldfinch, also imported into the colony, now flies about in wisps of hundreds, inflicting serious damage on the buds of crops and fruit-trees. It is a severe lesson this in natural history that we have learned, trying to exchange the wild creatures of different continents. Australia is in despair over the rabbit, and the Colonies and America alike hold the sparrow in abomination.

When I was travelling in the United States in 1883, I drew the sparrow-line from personal observation at Omaha on the east and Salt Lake City on the west. From the one side it had not then crossed the Mississippi. But it was steadily advancing, the aggressive little fowl, from both seaboards, and while it had pushed forward from the Atlantic into Illinois, so from the Pacific it had then travelled as far as Nevada. The tyranny of the sparrow is part of the price men pay for civilisation. Only savages are exempt. In America it has developed into a multitudinous evil, to which our own grievance against the bird is nothing; has dispossessed the children of the soil, and thrust its Saxon assumption of superiority upon the feathered natives of the country.

Sparrows do not respect Congress, and take no notice of legislative enactments for their extirpation. Imported as an insect-eating treasure, they have turned out grain-devouring impostors, and presuming upon the affectionate sentiments of exiled Englishmen have become a veritable calamity, and practically are officially branded as “vermin.” In New York and other cities, the townsfolk began by putting up nesting-boxes for the birds to build in, in the public gardens and on corners of buildings. But now, if they could, they would introduce a pestilence among them and exterminate the race. It is the same in Australia, and the man who “invented” the sparrow stands in the monument of public infamy only one niche lower than “the man who invented the rabbit.” And “pity ’tis ’tis so.” For the sparrow is not an unamiable fowl. The poet who blesses it “twittering forth its morning song, a brief but sweet domestic melody,” went perhaps too far, for if there is one thing for which “the nightingale of our roofs” deserves persecution, it is the exasperating monotony of its soulless chirp, and thus it is that one feels inclined to echo all Prior’s abuse of it:

But in spite of its monstrous impudence, or partly, perhaps, because of it, the sparrow is really a popular favourite. Of course, no one takes it very seriously. When the cat is seen on the lawn with a bird in its mouth, there is at first a thrill of indignation and horror, but when some one says, “It’s only a sparrow,” the indignation is greatly modified and the horror subsides. For though the cat may not catch a chaffinch without reprobation, she may fatten on sparrows without reproach.

Trying once to breed poultry, I found that ten sparrows to every fowl meant double expense in feeding, and as the sparrows were not starving, but only too lazy to go and find food in the fields, I had no compunction in “harrying” them, though I would not allow any one on the place to touch the nest of any other bird whatsoever. Not that sparrows care for persecution when it takes the form of pulling down their nests, for they seem to rejoice at the opportunity of beginning housekeeping all over again, and, as I have proved by experiment, will have started a new family in a new nest three days after the old nursery has been destroyed. What they detest is wire-netting of too fine a mesh for them to get through and the spectacle of grain scattered inside which they cannot reach. It is then that poor feeble man triumphs over the obstreperous sparrow and can exult over the birds as they hop, chirping round and round the impossible feast.

In London there is always enough food for the small creatures, and even in the hardest winter, when blackbirds and thrushes and all kinds of other birds, unsuspected residents many of them, are picked up dead in the parks and gardens, the sparrow is not pinched. So that in the popularity of the sparrow there is no tenderness involved. Londoners like him because he is one of themselves, because he is plucky and self-reliant, taking things much as they come; because he stands upon his rights, or what he has come to call his rights; is robust, and never “down at the mouth.” He is a dirty little ragamuffin, but not in the least ashamed of himself, for he takes his small smoky dusty person into the presence of Royalty with as much assurance as into a mews, and chirps as complacently all through service in Westminster Abbey as in a rain-spout in Shoreditch. The metropolitan cat seldom arrives at a sparrow, just as the small gamins of the streets never get run over by cabs. Their whole lives are spent in evasion, and they develop an extraordinary agility in escaping from accidents. I find it very hard to defend the familiar little fowl and almost as hard to accuse him. That he behaves with levity in places of public worship, that he is disrespectful to bye-laws and perpetually trespassing, is true enough; but how can you bring such misdemeanours home to a bird who hops up a water-pipe in reply to your charges? In private life, too, he is disreputable. As a frivolous parent given to rolling the eggs out of the nest, and even also his infant progeny; as an unworthy spouse, transferring his affections lightly, and often assaulting the partner of his joys and sorrows (and in return as often assaulted by her); as a bad neighbour, scuffling with his kind whenever he meets them—in each of these respects he presents himself to the severely moral mind as undeserving of respect. Yet with something of the eccentricity of judgment which commends to public regard the truly infamous Punch, who hangs the hangman, kills his wife, and throws the baby out of the window, we persist in looking upon the sparrow, with all his notorious faults, as a popular favourite and resent any serious exposure of his obliquities.

In one aspect he is altogether admirable—as the comrade of Britain’s soldiers and sailors in times of war. Wherever our ships go the sparrow goes, and as the troops march he accompanies the army as a camp-follower, but finding his own rations. He is established in Afghanistan, where he went with Roberts and Stewart, and in Zululand where Evelyn Wood and Buller showed him the way. Like the Roman eagles, he is the ensign of victorious advance, and should I ever chance to go there, I expect to find him at home, by right of arms and the men, at Buluwayo. As they crossed the Cabul river and the Buffalo and the Nile with our forces, claiming at once from the natives privileges of conquest which our generals hesitated to assert, so no doubt they have crossed the Shangani, and among the rock-kranzes and kraals of the Matabele now rear the young which, under other conditions, might have lived in Covent Garden and died within sound of Bow-bells.