SO writes Michael Drayton in the sixteenth century, and how true an observer of Nature the old poet was is proved by the words of our latest ornithologist: “It alights on some twig bending over the stream, its weight causing it to swing gently to and fro, whence it scans the young trout sporting in the pool below, and suddenly it will drop into the water, and almost before the spectator is aware of the fact, is back again on its perch with a struggling fish in its beak.” Nor must the meaning of Drayton’s “py’d” be mistaken, for in his day, and indeed much later, anything of more than one colour was called pied, so long as gaiety of tint was the result of the combination. So Shakespeare calls the daisy “pied,” and Ben Jonson the rainbow.

But to come back to our kingfisher, “famousÈd for

colours rare,” sitting upon its twig with the tiny fish in its beak. Only, however, for half an instant, for the bird raps its little captive sharply upon the twig, perhaps more than once, and then it is gone where all little fishes go that kingfishers chance to catch. Sometimes, indeed, it is not content to swallow the wee thing in a commonplace way, but, as the toucans often do with their food, must needs throw it up into the air, and catch it with open throat head first as it falls. And if you listen you will hear the kingfisher compliment itself upon its cleverness with a congratulatory little chirrup. So, too, when it misses its aim at a passing fish—for it does miss it sometimes—it comes back to its perch with a cheery little “peep-peep,” as much as to say “Never mind.” And when it flies off down the stream, startled by your sudden coming, you may, if you have quick ears, hear it comforting itself in a nervous sort of way with a succession of “peeps,” but if you go and hide behind the hedge or a bush, you will very soon see it returning, a swift flash of orange and blue, and lo! there is the kingfisher back again just where you first saw it, on its pliant twig, “with the small breath of the water shaken,” and its clever eye fixed upon the water beneath.

For, like flycatchers, shrikes and other birds, it returns, if it can, always to one “post of observation,” and just as the dragon-fly at the edge of the stream keeps flying back to the same reed after every excursion, so the kingfisher, though you have just seen it go darting off like a blue gem on wings, in and out of ever so many twists and turns of the little stream, comes back, and in a surprisingly short time, to the very spot it started from.

This habit brings many of them to their death, for there are still, in spite of all the appeals of the humane, the protests of lovers of Nature, and the threatenings of the law, numbers of men who call themselves fishermen who try to do these lovely birds to death. That “halcyons” eat fish, and nothing else if they can get enough of them, is beyond all doubt, and when there are five young ones in the nest in the bank, they must kill a great number. But granting all this, the fact remains, that the man who would go about to compass the killing of a kingfisher is not an angler of the best type.

However, in spite of them and all other enemies, this sweet ornament of our rivers is still abundant, and there is no secluded stream where the lover of Nature may not enjoy himself with the sight of it at its work, patient and clever, or admire its rare beauty as it flashes up and down.

Indeed, it takes a very quick eye, sometimes, to make out the form of the bird as it passes: all that is seen is a sudden trail of sapphire blue, which, meteor-like, vanishes before you have time to say “There it is.” And what is its real colour? Sitting opposite you on its perch, the throne from whence this little king surveys its subject fishes, the bird is a beautiful chestnut and white, and its legs and feet are coral red. Then it dives, and as it goes down its plumage flashes a pure, clear blue, and as it comes up, taking the light at another angle, it is a lovely mixture of azure that is half emerald-green and of emerald-green that is half azure. For all these colours go to the painting of a kingfisher; but, as a rule, when it is flying from you it is simply a streak of sapphire. The young birds of the first year have their colours fainter, but even then are sweetly pretty, and there are not many sights in our wild Nature more completely attractive than that of the young brood sitting about close together on the roots among which their nest has been tunnelled out, while the old ones fly backwards and forwards, fishing for them and feeding them. And whatever happens, they all keep on saying “Peep-peep” to one another, in the happiest, contentedest way conceivable.

Their nest is a yard back in the bank. It takes the old birds two or three weeks to dig it out (though sometimes they will begin housekeeping in some convenient hole that the water-rat has left or the sand-martin deserted), and at the end of the tunnel, on a flooring of fish-bones, are laid the exquisite white round eggs, with shells so translucent that when they are fresh they look more pink than white.

Yet poets and others who draw so many morals from the pearl being found in what they are pleased to call a “foul” oyster, never allude, strangely enough, to Nature’s pretty lesson of the kingfisher, which comes arrayed in all its loveliness of plumage from the very dirtiest of holes. For it is a sad fact that kingfishers have the most magnificent contempt for everything like “sanitary arrangements;” yet once they have left their nests they are the chiefest jewels of the stream, among the prettiest things to be seen in all a summer’s day. Where they built was apparently once a mystery, for in the long-ago days of Greece and Rome the “halcyon” was supposed to go off somewhere near Sicily and other isles, and nest upon the open seas; and so fond were both pagan men and pagan gods of the little bird, that—so poets pretended—the seas were never stormy while the halcyons were nesting, and the word has passed into our language as the symbol of calm security and rest and peace. So in Keats:

And in Shelley:

And in Milton and Dryden, and Kirke White and Coleridge, and ever so many more. Another belief, which, strange to say, still holds its own in England, is that a dead halcyon hung up will turn its beak always in the direction of the wind. So Shakespeare says of courtiers who “turn their halcyon beaks with every gale and vary of their masters”; and Marlowe, before him, asks “How now stands the wind? Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill?”

But oddest of all is the following superstition from an English book of the twelfth century:—“These little birds, if they are preserved in a dry place, when dead never decay; and if they are put among clothes and other articles, they preserve them from the moth and give them a pleasant odour. What is still more wonderful, if when dead they are hung up by their beaks in a dry situation, they change their plumage every year, as if they were restored to life, as though the vital spark still survived and vegetated through some mysterious remains of its energy.”

None of our British birds probably feels a severe winter more keenly than the kingfisher, for when the streams are frost-bound and icicles hang from the willows where it used to perch so blithely in the summer days, the little creature is in a desperate plight. Insect-eating birds have a last resource in berries and vegetable food, but the kingfisher, when the streams are frozen and the ponds all ice-locked, has nothing to fall back upon, and so he wanders off to the seashore and the mouths of rivers that are still open. “Even here,” says a writer, “the poor kingfisher often fares badly, and after an unusual spell of frost numbers of them are picked up starved to death. Sometimes they are found frozen to the branch on which they have been sitting.” But in open weather its life is as joyous as any bird’s can be, and is passed among the prettiest of scenery.

You will note, or may fancy that you do, that it is

always the most delightful bends of the streams, the most charming nooks and corners of the waterways and pools that the kingfisher haunts. Where the scenery is open and tame, he is only a passer-by. But where his beauty adds the one charm of life, and beautiful life, that was needed to make some special “bit” of loveliness complete, there the kingfisher lives. It is a sweet little poem, this bird. Does it see any of the beauty that we do in these archways of willow and alder, this exquisite embroidery of forget-me-nots upon the brink, this clump of yellow flags and fair tall willow-herb? One could almost imagine that it does, so careful is it to pitch its camp just where Nature is at its best. Here the banks are flowered and prettily uneven with mossy stumps and roots “peeping out upon the brook.” The moor-hen is at home here, and that delightful, harmless little beast the water-vole.

I remember once seeing a water-vole sitting up at its front door in the sun, nibbling its crisp salad of young reed-shoot: on one side of it grew a tuft of “faint sweet cuckoo-flower,” and just above it was a great rosette of primroses, and I thought I had never seen anything more enchanting than this quiet little touch of innocent and pretty spring.

One of them has his hole yonder where there is a little overhanging bulge in the bank, and that little platform which seems neatly laid with rushes is his dining-room, and from it, running either way, you can easily trace the small animal’s regular path to points where he can slip into the water quietly. If he were to jump in off his doorstep he would make a splash: a great indiscretion in a water-rat. So he toddles off to the right or the left as his fancy takes him, till he comes to a conveniently shelving place where he can take to water without noise.

Under that green moss-furred root, over which his pathway so clearly goes, is the kingfisher’s nest. The hole runs in straight for about three feet, and at the end is “the nest,” and the little birds sitting in it can tell by the stoppage of the light at the entrance that father or mother has come back with a fish, and they hurry forward, crouching low, with out-stretched necks (for the tunnel is only three inches high), to get the food first. So the strongest or hungriest gets fed first, and when it has had enough it stays behind when the next race to the opening takes place, and the weaker or lazier take their turns till all are satisfied. And this is the simple explanation of that which so often puzzles people—“How do the old birds know that all the young ones have been fed? can they count, or do they know them all one from the other?”

No, they cannot count, and they do not know one from another. If you watch a bird at a nest, it gives the food to the nearest mouth: it never picks and chooses. But young birds know when they have had enough—for the present. If you are feeding a young bird you have taken from the nest, how ferociously it takes the first bit, and the second, and perhaps the third; and then how utterly and suddenly its appetite collapses! It refuses, in the most dogged and sulky way, to open its beak though you tempt it ever so much. It has had enough, and it knows it, and isn’t going to burst for you or for anybody else. It is just the same in the nest. The first two or three pieces of food may all follow one another down the same throat, but next time the mother comes there is one mouth shut tight. And so it goes on. One by one the mouths are shut up, and the mother comes at last with a titbit, and finds every one of the little ones asleep, on full stomachs, and as haughtily regardless of her and her provender as if they would never need feeding any more. So the mother eats it herself, and sits down on the top of the sleepers. This is the whole secret of the mystery. While the little birds are hungry they keep on asking for more: as soon as they are stuffed full they convey that information to the parents by holding their tongues. So all get fed.

And a word here as to that odd superstition which is still current, that the British Museum will give “a hundred pounds for a complete kingfisher’s nest.” Every year the “authorities” are written to by people in the country offering to send them one at the price, but of course it was never offered, and indeed a kingfisher’s nest has not been wanted, since the beautiful section of a river-bank, with the nest, and young, and old ones all complete, was set up in the Bird Gallery at the British Museum in 1883. But the kingfisher’s nest is not the only article that a deluded public seems to imagine the British Museum is still pining for, for as a letter to the Times by Sir J. Flower in 1894 tells us, offers are regularly received of tortoise-shell tom-cats at the most exorbitant prices, and inquiries continue to come in, asking if it is true that the Museum has offered a hundred pounds for “an entire cigar-ash.”

Nowhere can the lover of Nature find more to spend his time over than in the pretty haunts of this pretty bird. As a schoolboy I have spent many hours in water-meadows watching the bird-life about me, and, sitting on some mossy stump in the middle of the marsh-marigolds or on some rail that straddled across the water, enjoyed the little spectacles, comic and serious, that various companies of amateurs—moor-hen and water-rat, bunting and reed-warbler and weasel—presented for my entertainment.

My visits to the kingfisher’s osier-beds were often really Platonic. There were no eggs to be taken that I had not enough of and to spare in my collection. Albeit the chance of a cuckoo’s egg always made looking into every nest I found “a pleasurable expectation,” which was just often enough fulfilled to make the quest a perpetual hope.

Not that the keeper—“arbiter of this terraqueous swamp”—would have believed me if he had caught me, and no monkey in Brazilian forests hated the jaguar more

than I hated the keeper. Sometimes just as I was really happy, and doing nothing more criminal than watching a water-rat that was trying to balance itself on an arrowhead stem while it reached up to the seeds, I would hear his detestable splashing—stealthy, he thought it, no doubt, the clumsy wretch, but noisy enough to warn my Red Indian ears a long way off—and I had to go. His own squelching feet and big body forcing a way through the osiers, which whipped his face as he went, hid the noise of my retreat as I slipped along like some fox, hardly scaring the birds that I passed, and cunningly stepping from point to point so as scarcely to make a splash. And so out at the other end and up into the high road and home as hard as I could run.

On one occasion, all but taken by surprise, I suddenly heard the keeper’s step close by, and had to slip into the water and sit there, like a coot, with only my head above the surface, and that half-hidden by reeds—and he passed, oh! so close to me, stopped for an instant to wonder to himself, perhaps, why the water was rippling so, and then went on, so cautiously, so cunningly, knowing that a boy was somewhere about, and expecting to pounce on him; while I just as cautiously rose from my sloppy, weedy lair, and crept off in the other direction, and got into the dusty road, my boots squelching dreadfully, and making as I jogged along (as Ben Jonson says) “great S’s like a watering-pot.”

And what was there in the osiers to amuse a boy? First of all, there were the water-rats, always funny, but never so comical as when cutting reeds. You would see one go down under the water, and the reed would begin “twiddling” and quivering in response to the sharp brown teeth at work below, but instead of falling, the reed would lean up against the next one, and when the vole came up to look for it, it would not see it, but it used to say “Bless me, how odd!” and go under again, and begin cutting another one down, bothering the dragon-fly who was sitting on it very much by the vibration. Then it would come up again, catch hold of it, and swim away to the stump where its hole was, and drag it up and cut it into lengths like an imitation beaver making a dam, and stop every now and again and look round, though there was only myself and the dragon-fly to appeal to, as much as to say, “There! that’s the way it’s done.” And if there were two of them, to see the way they stroked each other’s cheeks with their tiny paws, just as the wallabies do, putting one hand on each side of the other’s face, was as pretty as could be. Then there were the dabchicks, who came swimming along under water right over one’s feet, looking like bags of bubbles, or as if they were all covered with globules of quicksilver, and stopping to eat something at the bottom, as if they were fish, not birds. Then they would come to the top for air, catch sight of me, and with a horrified little “Goodness gracious!” bob under water again and go off straight down the little canal, a streak of bubbles.

Above all, there was the moorhen, a bird that one can surely never be tired of watching, it is so full of quips and cranks. It has a little red wafer on its nose and queer little patches of white under its tail, which it keeps on flicking as it goes in a comical automatic sort of way, in time with its steps, as if its tail were a kind of pedometer measuring off the distances it walks. And when it is in the water swimming, it jerks its head backwards and forwards, as if doing so helped it along and it could not help jerking every time it kicked out its legs. And when it is in the water, how it bobs about! You can never depend upon it for an instant, going in the direction it started for; something or other is sure to attract its attention, especially if it has its brood behind it, and its mate is on the watch, making a great show of vigilance and unnecessary sagacity.

The young ones—trying to follow the mother’s movements as she darts at a fly here, pecks at something there, suddenly stands on her head to fetch something up from down below, or makes an unexpected dash at an insect that is skimming across to the reeds—twist and wind about and get in each other’s way, like a squad of badly-managed boats, that keep on fouling and ramming one another, and all the time keep up a feeble little chorus of disconsolate cheep-cheep. But they are learning their lessons all the time, and it is delightful to watch their imitations. They gape at the passing flies, make sudden little excursions, three inches at a time, after something they think they see, and ridiculously attempt to dive, as they notice their mother do. But they are so light and so weak that the resistance of the water is too much for them, and all they can do is to put their heads under water and kick in the air with their legs, exactly like little boys trying to turn somersaults on the grass, but only getting half over.

Indeed, whatever the moorhens are doing, they are interesting, and there is an alert sprightliness about them when in company that is infinitely amusing. When an old bird is alone (it is impossible to tell cock from hen) it is very self-respecting and purposeful. As it goes upon the grass there is a high-stepping, aristocratic gait about its walk that even the affected little flirt of the tail accentuates, and when he is in the water, with some object-point in view, he swims both fast and straight. And what beautiful homes they find, where the yellow iris grows, and the marsh-marigold, and tangles of forget-me-not, where the stream filters in the shallows through beds of cress, or deepens into pools, so that the water-lily may spread its pads at ease. And there are beds of bulrush and feathery-headed reeds, into which they paddle; and if you do not mind wet feet, you can go and look right along the little “pleached” alleys they have made for themselves, to the end where the nest, a heap of rushes with a comfortable hollow smooth-lined with finer material, closes the passage. No bird nests more becomingly than the moorhen, or more picturesquely; and if it were not that I remembered the enjoyment I used to find in wading after them, and (with some shame be it said) the excellence of the eggs when hard-boiled cold, I should look back with more repentance than I do to the wholesale manner in which I used to fill my handkerchief full of the large speckled eggs, and triumphantly distribute them along the table at tea-time. Alas! for Clare’s supposition that

While I robbed her—a moorhen by judicious robbery can be made to go on laying twenty eggs and upwards—the mother would get into the water under the shadow of the reeds, and with only her head out, watch the spoliation in progress. And sometimes, coming upon her asleep, perhaps, on her nest after her young ones had hatched, it was a sight to see how suddenly she vanished, and how the chicks scrambling out after her in a twinkling, stood on their heads, thinking they too had dived out of sight. I have often taken up the little fluff-balls in my hand, and wished to take them home, but kinder thoughts have supervened, and I have laid them back on the water and watched them paddle off to the shelter where the poor mother, only her red-spot beak showing above water, crouched, clucking nervously in stage whispers, “This way, this way.”

Sitting at ease one day watching a family party, I became aware of a rat that was watching them as well—a common brown farmyard rat—that, with so many others of his kind, haunt osier-beds and streams, and, by their depredations, bring discredit upon the water-vole. The miscreant was on the bank; the “moor-chickens” were paddling in a dutiful, unsuspicious fashion behind their mother, when one of them, coming to some weeds, must needs scramble on to the top, to show what a clever bird it was. Something it found there interested it for an instant, and meanwhile all the rest went on. Then I saw the rat slip into the water, and swim towards the little platform of weeds; and the chick saw it too, and wondered, no doubt, what it was. But it decided that the thing did not look quite right somehow, and got into the water to follow its brothers and sisters. If it had known what was behind it, and had paddled at its best pace, it would have beaten the rat easily; but it was in no hurry, and went slowly across towards the bank. Close behind it swam the rat. The little bird was doomed. In my cap I had some dabchick’s eggs, and I took one out, and trusting to luck to miss the bird, threw it at the beast. There was a smart splash in the water, just where I had hoped to see it, close to the rat’s nose, and the next instant the chick was swimming for dear life after its mother and the rat was scrambling up the bank. I wonder what each of them thought of that dabchick’s egg? Nothing so “wonderful” as that ever happens to us in our lives. With birds and beasts it happens every day. But they do not go crazy at the constant repetition of miracles, for, fortunately, they do not understand them.

Next to moorhens, the most constant companion of the visitor to the sedgy margins of a pond or osier-bed is the reed-warbler. To many eyes the reed-and the sedge-warblers look alike, and to most ears their songs sound alike. Nor in their comings and goings and general behaviour is there much to distinguish them as they creep about in their shady coverts

or momentarily flit across some narrow space, or with a flight like a flying-fish’s in the water, suddenly appear on the surface of the reeds, skim their level tops, and as suddenly drop down out of sight again. They come to England together, and together seek the same haunts. The only way to make them betray themselves is by throwing something among the reeds, when each of them will at once protest, sometimes scolding like a whitethroat, sometimes breaking out into a bold, beautiful song. Each bird, too, occasionally forgets its shyness, and coming out from its retreat perches well in sight and fearlessly sings its loudest. But their nests are unmistakable; for while the sedge-warbler always builds upon some support, the reed-sparrow hangs its nest between supports, but never upon them. Yet as you loiter near their pretty nesting-places, it does not matter much which of the birds you disturb, for either will sing for you as long as you remain, and it is a charming sight to see the little olive-green bird clinging to a reed or a willow-withe, and with stretched throat singing with all its might. A very little wind makes it sway, and this, with the bird’s strange ventriloquist powers, makes the song seem to sway, too, and as you watch it, the small creature grows quite mystical, with its notes, now near now far, and its beautiful little body swinging to and fro in the chequered shadow of the tall plumed reeds. And sometimes, while he is singing, the hen-bird, as if excited by his song, begins too, in a harsher voice but not unmusical, and once started you will hear the duet going on behind you long after you have left. In the warm evenings, when out with my net moth-hunting along the river side, I have often heard them singing among the sedge and willows, and later, coming home in the dark, have found them still in full song.

As a matter of fact, our short nights in summer have often as much melody as the days. Not so much chatter and chirruping and twittering, but quite as much song, for there are none of our singing-birds that, when the fancy takes them, will not add a beauty to a fine night by their music. Sleeping out of doors (I do so as often as I can get the chance), I have at one time or another heard them all, the cuckoo and the owl together, the robin and the nightingale.

There is one exception, the skylark, and inasmuch as I have never heard it singing in the dark, I always consider it either the sleepiest or the most methodical of all birds. To call the lark lazy and a “slug-abed,” to use Shakespeare’s word, sounds, I know, like treason, for has not every poet from Chaucer onwards told us that it wakes the day; and is not “to rise with the lark” a household word for being up very early? But if we come to prosy facts, they are all dead against the skylark, for by the time it begins to think of awaking the day, the other birds have been already doing it for hours. Of course, it may be that the sun does not pay any attention to the other birds, regards them as unlicensed watchmen who have no business to try and wake him up before his proper time, and that he waits for the lark, as the only genuine certificated waker-up of the firmament, before he gets out of bed. Robins and blackcaps, woodlarks and reed-warblers are perhaps mere irresponsible amateurs. The skylark is the one properly diploma’d professor. He alone really knows when the sun ought to be awakened; the rest only think they know.

To tell the truth, if Phoebus were to attend to every bird that chooses to call him, he might just as well breakfast overnight; lie down on the sofa with his hat and boots on, or not go to sleep at all. Moreover, the skylark has the merit of punctuality and is regular. He is always up and singing by the time there is light enough to see him by. The sun can rely upon him, which is more than can be said for the robin, who, though I do not wish to say anything about him that might injure his character, sings in the mornings decidedly tipsily, as if he had been out all night at a party and were just coming home “with the milk.”

But no treason of the robin! More than any other bird it has endeared itself to our race, and our earliest literature bears witness to the national affection for “the charitable ruddock.” Somehow or another, the pretty fancy has attached itself to the bird, that it “covers the bodies of unburied men,” and long before Shakespeare utilised it to beautify a passage it had passed into the proverbs of the country. But even those who do not remember the charming legend with which the story of “The Babes in the Wood” familiarises every English nursery, love the robin for its beautiful confidence in man and woman, and for its brave-hearted song. While the trees are still bare in spring, and before the thrushes and blackbirds have begun to try their voices, the robin chants his cheery song, so full of bright faith and gladsome hope that the hearer cannot but take fresh heart on hearing him sing of better times. In summer, when “varied music burthens every bough,” the voice of the little preacher of the wood is lost for a while, but by-and-by, when the songsters all have gone southward with the sunshine, and the chill rain drips from empty boughs upon the russet drifts of autumn leaves, the robin mounts the vacant choir, and out of the fulness of his own brave little heart utters his sweet brief canticle, “thanking God” so it seems “for a life so fair,” and bidding all the sad who listen to him to renew their hopes and be light-hearted, to continue in their joy. And so to December and the end of the year, which the robin-redbreast always sings out with a happy Christmas carol.