ANOTHER bird that visits country-houses with unbounded confidence in man, if man would only recognise it, is the owl. How many people know that if they will put little barrels up in trees, or among ivy, that the barn-owls will accept the invitation and make the barrels their home, bringing to it many a hundred mice in the course of the year, and scaring away thousands more? Yet such is the case. And those who keep pigeons need not be alarmed. The owl will not touch them, and the owners, if they will take the trouble to watch, may see the owls making the dove-cot their perch and their starting-point on their sallies, their tower of observation, and the pigeons showing no uneasiness whatever at the coming and going of the cat on wings. When will the time come that gamekeepers, under pain of immediate dismissal, will be forbidden by their masters to shoot owls? As it is, this bird, which ought to be as common as the rook, is actually rare; and when it goes out to kill the mice and rats, which are the farmer’s worst enemies, it has to sneak to and fro as if it was a criminal, doing something that it should not—

Owls, as a matter of fact, should be tempted in every way to live amongst us, and a reward should be given to every farm-hand who brought first news of a nest upon the grounds. That they do no mischief is absolutely beyond all doubt; that they do an enormous amount of good is as absolutely on proof. Yet farmers’ gamekeepers, many of whom are simply poachers promoted to private employment, grossly ignorant and brutal men, are allowed to shoot these valuable birds as if they were a pest. Poor owls! They had a bad name given them in the beginning, and, such is the persistence of popular prejudice and superstition, their bad name still clings to them among the class of rustic from which the farmers’ gamekeepers are too often selected, the men who commit the very offences of egg-and-game stealing, of which they falsely accuse the owl.

The literary history of this admirably useful and beautiful bird is a chronicle of calumny and ill-treatment. There is no epithet too bad for it in poetry; it is deadly, dreadful, wicked, hateful, fearful, fatal, dire, accursed, curst, unhallowed, obscene, and is called every kind of name, “bird of hate,” “of the grave,” “of death,” “of gloom,” “messenger of death,” “herald of disaster,” “foul bird of omen.” “The screech-owle betokeneth always some heavy news, and is most execrable and accursed in the presages of public affairs. He keepeth ever in the deserts, and loveth not only such unpeopled places, but also that are horribly hard of access. In short, he is the very monster of the night, neither crying nor singing out clear, but uttering a certain heavy groan of doleful moaning. And, therefore, if he be seen within cities, or otherwise in any place, it is not for good, but prognosticates some fearful misfortunes.” These are Pliny’s words, and sum up therefore the collective opinion of antiquity. Nor has this opinion ever changed, for poets in our own century sing of—

Little by little, no doubt, the superstition will die out; but they die so hard, these prejudices of the ignorant, that the owl runs a risk of becoming extinct before it is properly appreciated.

Another handsome bird on “the tables of proscription,” is the magpie; but it deserves all the persecution it receives, for though it certainly eats a certain number of snails and insects, it is far more partial to eggs and young birds; and its audacity is so extraordinary, that only its death puts an end to its marauding, while its cunning is such that shooting a magpie is a matter of the greatest difficulty. The numbers that are destroyed annually must be very large; but the magpie is a prolific bird, and withal so astute in its nest-building that it is still in the greater part of the country a common object. Its nest, indeed, is a fortress, proof against all natural enemies, and offering even considerable chances of

immunity from man, for it barricades it with thorns, domes it over, and very skilfully conceals the entrance. Moreover, it has the sagacity to build, as a rule, in tall hawthorns, than which no tree offers more difficulties to even the hardiest and most weasel-bodied bird’s-nester. Failing trees, as happened in a certain barrens pot in the north of Scotland, magpies will build in a gooseberry-bush, but finding this position exceptionally exposed to enemies, they not only built their nest of the usual strength, but fortified the bush itself with a chevaux-de-frise of dead gooseberry-twigs, a foot in thickness, and impenetrable even by a mouse. To this stronghold they returned year after year; but the cottagers, who gave the birds protection for the sake of their society, were compelled to confess that the only return the pies made for their clemency was to try to rob the hens and kill the chickens.

Jays in many ways resemble magpies, being quite as cunning and just as destructive; and even those who are most averse to the persecution of any wild creature are compelled to warn the jay off their premises if they wish their game to thrive, or the song-birds in their shrubberies to live in security. For this beautiful but unprincipled bird is a most diligent and successful bird’s-nester; and, in spite of its conspicuous plumage, so stealthy in its mischief, that a pair will “work” a shrubbery thoroughly without betraying themselves even to the gardeners. Even if the clamour of the small birds attracts you to the spot, you will see nothing to explain their alarm, and the cat that you afterwards come upon watching for a mouse under the bushes is saddled with the blame which ought really to be fastened upon the pretty wretches that are watching you from the foliage overhead. The magpie and jay are, I confess, two birds that I like to see—on other people’s grounds. On my own I should prefer them stuffed, and right handsomely do they lend themselves to the artistic taxidermist. In combination and contrast no two birds are more beautiful, and as an ornament for a hall or billiard-room are not to be surpassed. For to the maximum of admiration there goes only the minimum of compunction.

But this is not the case with another of the brutal gamekeeper’s victims, that exquisite little falcon, the kestrel. All day long it is busy at the good work which the owl takes up at nightfall, for it lives almost entirely upon mice, and, these failing, upon large insects, especially the destructive cockchafer. It so very rarely molests a bird that, hawk though it is, you never see the smaller feathered-folk in alarm at its approach. “He is no enemy of theirs, and mingles freely with them, almost unheeded.” Observe what consternation the sparrow-hawk brings to the little songsters when he is abroad; but how different when the kestrel passes overhead! The chaffinch, instead of uttering cries of alarm, continues his merry notes; and the larks and pipits pay no attention to the little bird of prey. When it hovers over the farmyard, or hunts round the ricks, no anxious hen clucks to her scattered family any note of warning or recall, the sparrows continue at their meal, and the swallows, unconcerned and trustful, wheel twittering in the air. Its nest is sometimes found in holes in buildings where doves and starlings are its companions. But for mice of all kinds the kestrel has only unrelenting and ceaseless hostility; and it has been calculated that a single pair will account in a season for the astonishing number of ten thousand.

Its favourite method of hunting makes the kestrel a familiar bird by sight, and gives it its name of “windhover,” for,

it hangs suspended in the air over a given spot, until it either

sees a mouse below it, upon which it then drops with lightning speed, or else decides that there is nothing there, when it moves on a little further and hovers again, thus beating a field or moor thoroughly over before it leaves it. And while it is thus engaged the gamekeeper steals upon it and shoots it, and, taking it home, the mutton-headed ignoramus that he is, nails it up on his “tree,” in the company of that other good friend of man, the owl.

But the gamekeeper’s enormities reach their climax when he murders that noble bird the heron. His master perhaps has a field or two that runs down to a stream, and in the advertisement, by which the thrifty farmer makes annually a few pounds, of “so many acres of shooting to let,” there is added, the “right of fishing in the river so-and-so.” So if by any chance a poor heron, strayed from the upper reaches where some nobleman or gentleman preserves this fine bird, comes on the farmer’s meadows, the farmer’s gamekeeper (it is sport exactly to his taste) stalks it from behind the line of willows and kills it as it stands there. He will probably get a shilling for it from the birdstuffer, and that is quite enough reason to him for destroying the heron. It is a great pity these miserable men are allowed to fire anything but blank cartridge. On the larger estates the head-gamekeeper is often a man of intelligence and a sound naturalist, and owls and kestrels are not murdered, and the heron, of course, goes free. But on either side of him may be a farmer who keeps a “gamekeeper” who steals eggs and young birds from his aristocratic neighbours, so that his master may let his “shooting” to some “city gents from London,” and who, though there maybe a heronry on the adjoining estate, kills the birds when he gets the chance, because, as he says, he has to “preserve the fishing,” but really because he can get a few pence for its skin. Sometimes a heron appears in a poulterer’s shop and finds a purchaser who is curious in matters of eating[B] and wishes to taste a fowl that once was so highly prized as to be the dish of honour in the game course at banquets of State.

But there are not, I fancy, many men, except farmers’ “gamekeepers” and their confederates the so-called “naturalists”,

who would pull a trigger upon a heron. The admiration of Nature is very sincere in the educated Englishmen of to-day, and by far the greater number of them would rather see the beautiful creature making their estate its home than kill it. It is, indeed, the very genius of beautiful solitude, and by its mere presence raises the commonplace to the picturesque.

Take a secluded bend of any stream, with its alders and willows, its wild flowers stealing down to the water’s edge to see their faces in the glass, and yellow flags boldly wading out by their companies and battalions into mid-stream. The dragon-flies poise upon the tips of the reeds, or with rustling wings dart and wheel upon the water, puzzling the coot’s flotilla of puff-balls paddling about among the water-daisies. The scene is sweetly pretty, and when on a sudden a kingfisher on sapphire wings comes flashing past, enhancing every charm by its transient brilliance, the pretty becomes lovely, and the little common reach of water catches a glimpse of fairyland possibilities, and of beauties something rarer than of every day. Then let a heron on its broad slow-moving wings come up the stream, and lo! the whole scene changes. It becomes at once unfamiliar, of another world, exotic. The heron’s long legs are dropped down, the long neck stretched out and, almost as a spectre might appear, there stands “the bird so gaunt,” its crest-feathers slightly raised, its eyes scrutinising the banks. Silent as the great bird is, you must keep more silent still. For it is watching and listening as only the bird can do that fishes by sound as well as by sight. If it is satisfied, the aigrette, “fit for the turban of a king,” droops flat to its head, the neck is retracted, the wings comfortably closed, and the heron relapses into that beautiful attitude of patient watchfulness that Art delights in. And as it stands there, motionless in misty grey, in the utter silence of the tranquil corner, it looks like one of the jinns of Arabian tales, for its being there seems to bewitch the place and the stream becomes haunted.

So I remember once how when I was in India lying down in the jungle waiting for a bear to be driven, a sambhur-stag with splendid antlers came spectrally into the open space that my rifle covered. An instant before it was empty. Not a leaf stirred, and yet there, on the sudden, stood the great-horned stag, only a few paces from me, listening to the distant voices of the beaters. An instant later, and it stepped into the jungle again and vanished as silently, completely, as a ghost. And I rubbed my eyes and blinked, but I know that it came and that it went.

And where, to come back to our heron, is the fisher now? A minute ago it seemed as if it would never move: a statue in feathers set up there among the forget-me-nots for the stream-folk to worship. But while your eye has been following that fat perch loitering by the side of its shadow, as if they were company for each other, in that little clear patch of water by the bank which a shaft of sunlight pierces to the pebbled floor, the heron, with half a dozen stately, noiseless steps has changed its ground, and passing behind that thick spray of willow that droops “aslant the stream,” is out of sight. Come away, yourself, as quietly as you can: the poor heron is not often left in peace by those who see it. Be, then, one of the few who treat the noble bird with courtesy.

It is not given to many to see a large heronry at breeding time, but should the opportunity offer, it is well worth your while. The size of the birds alone makes them interesting, and the spectacle of so many flying to and fro at once and the grotesque nestlings flopping about on their nests or standing grimly but with uncertain foothold at the edges, their half-humorous, half-wicked looks and gestures, will keep your glasses to your eyes as long as friends will wait for you. The noises that proceed from old and young alike are both solemn and comical, disconcerted fragments of croaks and squeaks, mingled with such discordant scraps of sound as a child trying to blow a coach-horn might produce. The young ones too keep falling off their perches, probably because the instinct to try and stand on one leg is too strong for their prudence and their thin knee-joints. They manage, as a rule, to scramble and flap themselves on to other standpoints, but very often, failing to make good their foothold, they fall to the ground, when the parents seem to lose all further interest in them. To these accidents probably is due the superstition alluded to by Marvel:

In the old cruel days when falconry was for a time so “fashionable,” the heron—or rather the heronsewe, hornsea, hornsey or hernshaw, for these are the older names of the bird we call heron and hern—was the fowl chiefly flown at with the largest and fiercest falcons, and the penalties for killing the bird, except with hawks or the long-bow, were very severe. But modern falconers, whose sport is now as humane as sport can ever be, have to be content with water-fowl for their prime flights. For the heron is annually becoming rarer as a wild bird, and before long will probably only be seen in the vicinity of private heronries, where the courtesies of country neighbourhood protect it from wilful molestation, and suffice to preserve for all lovers of Nature the charming sight of these birds, by some hill-bound tarn, “sole-sitting on the shores of old romance,” seated aloft on “the pines, the heron’s ancient home,” or, like the spirit of tranquil solitude, beautifying the pleasant reaches of a river.