GLOSSARY

The Home of the Cormorant.[Face page 226.

There’s more tragedy than comedy however about bird-life. Many young birds are stolen from the nests, to say nothing of finches, warblers, linnets, and chats killed by hawks. Of course, all this is part of the plan of nature, though to my thinking there’s a deal of cruelty in it. What crueller thing can you imagine than a falcon cutting down a hern winging home, say to Trevethoe Park, where they breed, with food for its young? I never saw this; but one day, when lying up in Bosigran Cliffs watching for seals, I saw a fight between a peregrine and a raven, in which the raven got the worst of it. The falcon wanted the whole cliff to itself, and in the end he had his way, for the ravens forsook their nest.

A bird with a royal mien is a peregrine falcon, an ornament to the wild cliffs where he breeds. I have seen him soar till he looked like a speck in the blue, but I have never seen him stoop.

Now and again I’ve had glimpses of what is most beautiful in our bird-life—say of a kingfisher flying low over pools left by the ebb, when the sun catches its breast and back feathers; or what I once saw, and only once, a hern in full breeding plumage standing still as a statue in the shallows of a sparkling pool. I remember how lovely he looked. It was on the moor above Lanyon Quoit, when the early furze was in bloom; and both the hern and myself were after the trout.

For gulls, you won’t find a better place than Newlyn harbour. I have shot the great black-back there, and the little gull, a bird no bigger than a turtle-dove; and from the pier-head I shot a “Bonaparte” gull, a bird that breeds in the Great Salt Lakes of America. You may ask if it came from there. I do not know, but I believe it did. Governor Augustus Smith of Scilly once brought my father an Esquimaux curlew. Where did that little stranger come from, what frozen seas lit by “Northern lights” had he flown over?

I say, there are wonderful things in bird-life, especially in their migratory movements. Take the red-breasted flycatcher that once reached here from the far East, or the snow-bunting whose home is within the Arctic circle, and probably at the Pole itself. But no, you will realise better if I take a bird you are familiar with. Consider the willow-wren or the golden-crest. One would say that either of them is incapable of long flights. Yet these little creatures, whose weight you can hardly feel in your hand, cross hundreds of miles of sea without putting their foot down, except, it may be, on a passing ship’s rigging. It’s not only the distance covered that’s so astonishing; what guides them in their long journey under the stars? Man navigates the ocean with the help of a compass, but how do the myriads of migrating birds find their way? I’ve puzzled my head many times to solve the problem, but I admit I’m beaten; unless they possess a sense of direction such as cats and dogs undoubtedly have, and which even the savage in the pathless forest is said to have developed.

The 8th of May and the 11th of October or thereabouts are the times of arrival in West Cornwall, and many’s the time I’ve watched the sun rise over Mount’s Bay on those days. What pictures I’ve seen there! The east afire, the west aglow with rosy light, beyond the belt of furrowy sand the blushing sea, and on the edge of it the little strangers wading and feeding. The dates of their departure are just as definite; and as the time for leaving our shores draws near, the birds gather at certain rendezvous and display great uneasiness. I have heard my father say, “The warblers will be off soon, Ned.” He used to feed the birds in our aviary over the porch as regular as clockwork every morning, and he would notice how restless they were, even throwing themselves against the bars of the cage whilst instinct stirred them.

I don’t believe any man ever understood birds better than my father; he was that observant, and could imitate their cries so exactly, all but talk with them, in fact. Mr Gould, when he visited Cornwall, always came to see him, and used to hang on his words, so to speak; and that was no mean compliment. But there, sir, you’ll think me prejudiced.

Talking of my father brings to mind an incident I will tell you. My father was very fond of wandering about Morvah and Zennor, when he could spare the time. You know what a lot of waste land there is in those parishes. Scattered over the downs there are some lonely pools frequented by birds, and in one of them I shot the only phalarope I ever saw alive. Well, my father was stealthily approaching rather a big pool when, to his annoyance, he saw a boy driving away some cattle that had been drinking there. Luckily he did not pass it by, for there on the bank, away from where the bullocks had been drinking, was a little bird that until then had never been observed in England. It was a buff-breasted sandpiper, and I could tell by his face when he returned home that he had shot something very rare. Whilst I was examining the bird by the lamp-light, my father took up theWestern Morning News; and when I asked him where I should put the bird for the night, he made no answer. Tired as I knew he was, I thought this strange, because he was such a genial man. The bad news he had seen in the paper had upset him; that was it. The French had lost a great battle, I think it was called Sedan. My father was very fond of the French. After Colenso, and in the same week too with Magersfontein and Stromberg, I thought of this incident, and I understood what my father had felt. Around our fires the men were so quiet that the camp might have been asleep. It would seem that such times are for thinking, not for question and answer. Forgive me, sir, for getting so down in the dumps.

My happiest days after birds were spent on the Eastern Green and around Marazion Marsh. I have always been fond of small wading birds, such as sanderlings, dunlins, stint, and turnstones. Shy and wild they are, and elegant they look, running about on the edge of the tide, following the ebb or advancing before the flow. Days and days I’ve watched them and returned home without firing a shot, but I’ve killed yellow-shank, dotterel, Kentish plover, and pygmy curlew there; and once I found, after a heavy gale, a stormy petrel washed up on the beach.

And now, perhaps I have said enough for you to understand why this little tongue of land, whose tip is the Land’s End, has got such a hold upon me. On the greyest day the moors are not dismal to me, nor the shores melancholy. There’s hardly a square mile out of the hundred that isn’t full of associations. The cliffs, the wastes of furze and heather, the tangled bottoms, the open beaches and the little coves, are all rich in pleasant memories; and the whistle of the curlew, the croak of raven or hern, the scream of sea-fowl, the piping of small wading birds and the song of the sedge-warbler are to me the music of familiar voices. Rolling veldt, mountain range and river don’t appeal to me like the downs, hills, and streams that I’ve got to know by heart.

The Land’s End.[Face page 232.

“A treeless, barren waste” a man once called the Land’s End district to my poor father, who preferred the scent of its furze to the perfume of roses and the bell-heather before hothouse flowers. Everything wild he liked, ay, loved; the sea-pinks, the golden samphire, the sea-holly, the ferns in the zawns, the seaweed in the pools, the shells on the beach. And when he was unable to move out of the house—he lived to eighty-two—he used to sit up in the little bay-window, where he could see the sun set, and watch for my return, and then he’d ask what birds I’d seen, and about the flowers. The speedwell, the scarlet pimpernel, and the forget-me-not were especial favourites of his, and I’d always bring home one or the other in my fishing-basket. Touching it was to see him look at them.

If ever a man loved nature with his whole soul, my father did, but above everything he loved the birds.

But come! we must be moving. I see the gulls are winging home.

GLOSSARY

PRINTED BY OLIVER AND BOYD, EDINBURGH

Transcriber’s Notes:

Spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. Some illustrations have been moved slightly to keep paragraphs intact.

[The end ofWild Life at the Land's Endby John Coulson Tregarthen]

Back to Index Next