THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID /w-g^i-A LON AND I/ONDON (REVISED EDITION) AND OTHER SKETCHES BY T. DIGBY PIGOTT, C B Naturam expeUas furcct.tamWr^auc recumt i HORACE . EP . LIB: I.X LONDON t H. PORTER, 18, PRINCES STREET, CAVENDISH SQUARE, 1892. **. The Mo, Sheringham, September, 1892 CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE LONDON BIRDS i CHAPTER II. THE BIRDS OF THE OUTER FARNES 31 CHAPTER III. THE SHETLANDS IN THE BIRDS'-NESTING SEASON ... 49 CHAPTER IV. THE LAST ENGLISH HOME OF THE BEARDED TIT ... 77 CHAPTER V. ST. KILDA FROM WITHOUT...* ... 89 CHAPTER VI. IN DUTCH WATER MEADOWS 109 CHAPTER VII. LONDON INSECTS ... 123 APPENDICES i-vii ' Tis always morning somewhere, and above The awakening continents, from shore to shore, Somewhere the birds are singing ever- m ore." Longfellow. WE are so accustomed to associate birds " the smiles of creation " with all that is wild and fresh, and pleasant, and unlike a great town, that to speak of the birds of London sounds rather like talking nonsense. It is, however, one great advantage which an ornithologist has over most other lovers of natural history, that there are few places in which he cannot find something in his own particular line to interest him, unless it is in countries where Robins and Tomtits have been too long marketable delicacies, and where/ as in some parts of the Continent, woods and plantations are dying off in consequence lands smitten with worms for having slaughtered the innocents. Longfellow's simile is much too good to be given up merely because, as commentators tell us, the King who died on his throne, as he made a speech to the people, was not the Herod who killed the babes of Bethlehem and added 2 London Birds. Childermas Day to the Calendar, but a nephew and namesake only. London is no exception to the general rule. Indeed, in some respects we are unusually favoured. To begin with, there are, of course, the splendid collections, dead and alive, in the British Museum and Zoological Gardens. There are the bird-stuffers' windows, into which a good proportion of the curious birds shot in the kingdom are sure to find their way. There are Leadenhall Market and the game-dealers' shops, with constantly changing supplies all through the year ; and, in hard weather, there are the wild- fowl hawkers about the streets, with great bunches of Stints, Curlews, and Oyster-catchers, doing duty as Snipe and Woodcock, and Pochards and Mallard, and Mergansers, " ancient and fish-like " enough to be smelt across the street, with their tell-tale saw beaks broken to make them Widgeon. But leaving these out of the question, there are the genuine wild birds of London ; and it may, perhaps, be a surprise to some readers to learn that a note- book of those seen by one person in the course of not more than a year in the immediate neighbourhood of Hyde Park, all sufficiently near to be identified with- out difficulty, included more than twenty species representatives of five of the six great natural orders into which birds are divided. The exception was the class of the " birds of prey," the Raptores " low-foreheaded tyrants " the first in scientific arrangement, but, according to a modern writer, the lowest almost of all in everything but brute force, because they can neither build nor sing. Wild birds of prey are not very common in London, but, though it is not every one who is fortunate enough to see them, members of both London Birds. 3 branches of the family, night fliers and day fliers, are occasionally to be seen. There was a report in the summer of 1891 that an Eagle had been seen circling over the East-end of London. The rumour was unconfirmed, but was the more likely to have been true, as about the same time a big bird of the kind, which, from the description given, was probably a young white-tailed Eagle, was seen, heading northwards, by two gentlemen fishing in the Stour, at Chartham, a few miles above Canter- bury. Dr. Edward Hamilton, who published in the Zoologist in 1879 a carefully compiled paper on " The Birds of London, Past and Present, Resident and Casual,"* numbering in all nearly a hundred, says that "in 1859 a Kite was observed flying over Piccadilly not above one hundred yards high," and mentions as " casual visitors " the Peregrine Falcon, Kestrel, and Sparrow Hawk. A large Owl a grave and reverend representative of the night fliers was apprehended by the police- constable on duty a year or two ago in the Repository of the Public Record Office, and after inquiry discharged with a caution unfortunately before the species had been determined. Another, of a species also undetermined, has since been recorded in the newspapers as having taken up its quarters for some days in a tree in the grounds of Guy's Hospital. We hear in these days much of the struggle for existence which is going on everywhere in Nature, and of adaptations in the forms of animals to the conditions under which they have to carry on the * A list of the birds noticed in London, based on Dr. Hamilton's paper is printed as an appendix. 4 London Bzrds. fight. There is not a clearer or more beautiful instance of the kind than the wing of a common Brown Owl. The bird has to hunt close for its prey in the dark. If it cut the air with the noisy flight of a Partridge or Wood Pigeon it would soon starve, for every one of the timid little creatures which are its natural food would take good care to keep out of sight till the danger was past ; and so as an oar is muffled to deaden the splash Providence has hung a soft, loose fringe of down to the front of the quill. This makes the Owl's flight, as every one who has watched a Barn Owl " mousing " knows, perfectly silent. Of the second, the " Passerine " the enormous order into which are jumbled all which cannot be classed as birds of prey or poultry, and which, as a rule, neither climb, nor wade, nor swim we have a very respectable party constantly in London. Not less than seventeen or eighteen appear in the list of birds seen within the year referred to at the beginning of the chapter, and this does not of course nearly exhaust the number of common visitors. First come the Thrushes the most timid, perhaps, of all ; but, by one of the apparent contradictions with which all classifications abound, nearly related to the Shrikes, which are the connecting link between the passeres and the birds of prey, and, in their own degree, scarcely less tyrants than the Eagles themselves. Song-thrushes are fairly common in Kensington Gardens and St. James's Park, where they nest regularly, and sing beautifully at times ; though, as a rule, they are very shy. During the middle of the day they manage, to a great extent, to keep out of sight ; and it is not often, when many London Birds. 5 people are about, that they show themselves in any considerable numbers. But when the gates are first open, and the early morning dew is on the grass, one may see them, four or five at a time stamping to start the worms, then hopping for a yard or two, and standing still to listen, with their heads on one side, and their bright eyes sparkling with attention. Blackbirds, too, are common, though less so than Thrushes, and also nest in St. James's Park. They are, probably, migratory with us, as they are more plentiful at some times of the year than at others. Fieldfares and Redwings are to be seen occa- sionally in cold weather ; but we have no great supply of berries to attract them, and their visits are short. But though, by right of their voices no less than the notch in their beaks, the Thrushes claim the place of honour ; easily, first among London birds, by numbers as well as impudence, are the Sparrows. Poking about in every gutter, and dusting themselves almost under the horses' feet with all the amusing self-possession of street urchins, they take care not to be overlooked. But for one quiet house in a corner, the Zoological gardens might be the happy hunting ground of good Sparrows. Dainties are to be had for the stealing all over the place, and even the lions and bears and Eagles are too sleepy and well-fed to resent any amount of petty larcenies. It is a melancholy thing, though, to see the end when it does come. The snakes are fed one afternoon in the week, and five or six tailless Sparrows are a dainty meal. Unlike the rabbits and guinea-pigs, who will nibble and sniff at a python's nose, they seem too wide-awake to doubt their fate for a moment, and crouch together in a 6 London Birds. corner, the picture of dejection till, if the snakes are hungry, there is a sudden flutter, and the miserable party scuttle over to another corner, one short in numbers ; and one may see a little bunch of feathers, at all sorts of impossible angles, peeping out from a coil of scales. The stroke is almost quicker than the eye can follow. London Sparrows evidently look upon Corinthian capitals as designed for their especial convenience in the nesting season; and Bishop Stanley tells of one pair which had the impertinence to build in the mouth of the lion on Northumberland House, long ago departed to the limbo of forgotten land- marks where Copenhagen and the "big" Duke on the Arch have since joined him. When the Duke's statue was taken down for removal to Aldershot, in 1884, it was found that more than one bird like Gavroche in the plaster elephant of the Place de la Bastille had set up house inside. There was a Sparrow's nest with a newly hatched young bird, and several eggs in the right arm ; and, in the elbow of the left, a nestful of young Starlings almost fledged. The front door of both establishments was a hole in one of the hands. With all its ragged untidiness, few things are grander in suggestion than a Sparrow's nest on Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's. It carries one back to the days when the author of the Eighty- fourth Psalm watched the birds building in the niches of Solomon's temple or, more probably looked back on with the eye of memory only from exile by the waters of Babylon and wrote, in words which have still all the freshness of three thousand years ago, " The Sparrow hath found an house, and London Birds. 7 the Swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young ; even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts, my King, and my God." The commonest Sparrows in the Holy Land Passer Syriacus though not actually the same, are almost identical with our own house Sparrows. In spite of overshadowing soot, there is a con- siderable variety to be noticed in the plumage of London Sparrows. One spotted with white and another of unusually light tint, very much the colour of a dormouse, have for more than a year escaped the cats at the foot of the steps by the Duke of York's column. Another, a cock bird, with a tail of almost pure white, had, in the spring of 1892, his headquarters just inside the rails of the Green Park, near Devonshire House. Of the Buntings, the only two which figured in the lists of birds seen within the year were a cock Yellowhammer, picked up dead in the Green Park, apparently starved to death ; and another seen in St. James's Square. . The latter was unluckily very tame, and paid dearly for a meal in the gutter, only just managing to flutter on to Lord Derby's house, much the worse for a cut from a cabman's whip. In March and April, 1890, the " ill-betiding croak" of the Raven was a familiar sound to West-end Londoners ; a fine fellow, who, judged by this tameness and by the fact that several wing feathers were missing, was probably an escaped captive, having for some weeks settled in Kensington Gardens where Carrion Crows are fairly common and not afraid to make free with the Ducks' eggs. Starlings build in numbers in the hollow trees ; and, with a few grey-headed Jackdaws, and poor ill-used Rooks, make themselves generally at home 8 London Birds. among the sheep, and are as talkative and merry as in the reed beds on the Norfolk broads. Two very interesting papers on " The Rooks and Rookeries of London," the one by Dr. Hamilton, the other by Professor Alfred Newton, are to be found in the Zoologist. The tale told is a sad one, and the conclusion drawn seems only too probable : "The Rooks and Rookeries so pleasant to old Londoners are gradually diminishing and disappear- ing, and the London Rook to our grandchildren will be a bird of the past." The story of the Kensington rookery is a sample of what is going on all through London. " In 1836," writes Dr. Hamilton, "this rookery extended from the Broad Walk near the Palace to the Serpentine, where it commences in the gardens, and there must have been nearly one hundred nests." " They are now," he adds, writing in June, 1878, " alas ! reduced to thirty-one nests and confined to a few of the upper trees skirting the Broad Walk near the North Gate." Since then almost every tree in the garden which had a nest in it has been cut down, and until the spring of 1892, when there were encouraging signs of a return, and one pair built again in a tree in the south-west corner, there seemed too much reason to fear that Kensington Gardens had lost for ever one of its greatest interests, and that the colony at Gray's Inn was destined to be the only considerable survival of the great rookeries once common in the middle of London. A Hawfinch, one of the comparatively rare birds which have apparently of late years become more common, was picked up in St. James's Park on the 28th January, 1890. It was a hen in good condition London Biras. 9 About the same time the following year, and in the same place, a Mountain Finch was found, a visitor from the North, uncommon in most parts of England, excepting during unusually severe winters. The bird, a male, was in fine plumage, and, judging by the brightness of its fawn colours and whites, could not have been long in London. A breastbone which felt through the feathers like the back of a knife, told the common tale of starvation. A pair of Chaffinches were to be seen more than once in April, a year or two ago, very busy collecting moss for a nest, between Victoria Gate and the fountains ; and two rather dingy little Blue-Tits were about the same time carefully investigating the trees close by, evidently with the same views. Cole-Tits, too, occasionally show them- selves in the Gardens. Both the Cole-Tits and Blue-Tits, the latter in considerable quantities, have been caught in London by Doctor Albert Giinther, who, before the removal of the collections from Bloomsbury, occasionally relieved his severer studies of Natural History by setting traps in the grounds of the British Museum. He has also caught Green- finches and Redpoles. House Martens in plenty, and with them Swallows and more rarely Swifts and the little brown Sand Martens, play on the ornamental waters. The House Martens build in several parts of London. There were three nests the marks were still to be seen a year ago in St. James's Street, two of them over Boss's, the gunmaker's shop, two more in Porchester Place, and three on a blank wall in Upper Seymour Street. " Where they most breed and haunt, the air is delicate," and their mud-houses are a compliment to our improved drainage. C 6 io London Birds. Everyone knows that it is unlucky to disturb a Swallow's nest, but the reason why may not be so generally known. Old women in Norfolk say that when the birds gather in thousands, as they do in many places before they leave us for the south, and sit in long rows on the church roof, they settle who shall die before they come again. Any one who has offended them during the summer may expect to have his name at least brought forward then for consideration. Wheatears are occasionally to be seen. Two small parties settled in London for a few weeks in August a year or two ago one in Hyde Park, the other in the Regent's Park. They are very inquisitive little fellows ; and, though they will whisk off their pretty white tails before one gets very near them, they cannot go far without stopping for another good stare. They are trapped in numbers in parts of England and France, in little holes cut in the turf, and commanded by common brick-falls. No bait is required, as they cannot resist the temptation to hop in to explore, and their next appearance in public is probably in vine leaves. The Kingfisher is, perhaps, the last bird one would expect to see in London. Two have been caught at different times in the grounds of the Museum facing Great Russell Street, and a pair, not long ago, made themselves at home for some time near the ponds in Regent's Park. Others have been noticed more than once of late years on the St. James's Park water. The country round London is a favourite haunt of Nightingales. They have been known very lately to breed in Battersea Park, and every now and then one London Birds. 1 1 finds his way into the one or other of the more central parks. They are curiously capricious in their choice of localities for settlement. It is a real Irish grievance though no attempt has yet been made to redress it by Act of Parliament that though to all appearance the country in parts, with its green copses and soft climate, is just what should suit them, they are never heard in Ireland. The cock Nightingales usually land in England eight or ten days before the hens. They sing their best when in expectation only of the happiness to follow them, and are said to be valuable as cage singing-birds only if caught as bachelors. It is touching to hear, on the authority of bird-catchers, who know what they are talking about, that a cock caught after he has paired is useless, and will probably mope till he dies. A Nightingale in splendid voice gave a series of early recitals a year or two ago in Kensington Gar- dens. In the heat of the day, when there were too many perambulators about, he kept out of sight, "in shadiest covert hid," but before breakfast sang without any attempt at concealment morning after morning on the same almond tree, not very far from the Prince Consort's Memorial. His song, poor fellow, was all the more impas- sioned, because the lady he sang for in all probability existed only in his dreams ; or, if they had really met and engaged themselves in the warm winter among the olive groves of the South, thought herself absolved from the engagement, and free to console herself with a less audacious mate in a quieter home beside some Kentish lane, when she heard her lover could wish her to follow him to shameless London. Alphonse Karr, in his "Voyage autour de mon C 2 12 London Birds. Jardin," complains of the misrepresentations which have resulted from slavish imitation of the classics by modern writers. Why, he asks, because poets writing in softer climates spoke truly enough of May as "the month of roses," should every French poet think it necessary to do the same, forgetting that what is true in Greece or Italy is not necessarily true in France, and that, as a matter of fact, roses do not blossom there in any very great profusion before June ? Nightingales have even more just cause to protest. Philomela as all of us know who are not too far removed from school days to remember anything of our Ovids was a Greek girl compromised in an affair of a marriage with a "deceased wife's sister." Her position, which was trying enough from the first became unbearable when it was found out that the first wife was not really " deceased " at all, but only put out of sight by the husband, who had cut out her tongue. Both sisters had cause enough for com- plaint, and because poor Philomela did complain and was changed in pity into a Nightingale, and the poets sang her sorrows ; therefore the Nightingale must be sad, and always posing as a love-lorn maiden. " The melancholy Philomel, Who perched all night alone in shady grove Tunes her soft voice to sad complaining love, Making her life one great harmonious woe." Milton, the Londoner, steeped as he was in the classics, as a matter of course follows suit, and for him the Nightingale is necessarily " Most musical, most melancholy." But even Shakespeare, of whom we might have hoped better things, could not altogethe free him- London Birds. 13 self ; and once, in his writings though certainly only to put the word into the mouth of Valentine, the love- sick Gentleman of Verona we find the inevitable " Nightingale's complaining note." By-the-bye, if nothing to do with Milton, and Shakespeare had come down to us but their poetry, we should not have had any great difficulty in ar- riving at a fairly true idea of the sort of lives the two men lived by merely comparing the manner in which each refers to birds. Take, for instance and there are plenty of other passages at least as much to the point such little touches, fresh from Nature, as " Far from her nest the Lapwing cries f away,' My heart prays for him, though my tongue do curse," in the " Comedy of Errors." Or in " Much Ado about Nothing " " Look, where Beatrice like a Lapwing runs Close to the ground to hear our conference." Or " Like an eagle in a dove-cote, I Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli." One hears the clatter of the wings, as the startled Pigeons break out all round. Contrast these with any of Milton's allusions to birds. " Birds of Jove " driving before them " birds of gayest plume," " ravenous fowls " hurrying to a field of battle, or " Vultures on Imaus bred Disfledging from a region scarce of prey To gorge the flesh of lambs," &c. It is not necessary to multiply instances. In almost 14 London Birds. any page of the writings of either that one opens, the contrast forces itself into notice. The magic wand is the same, but the hands that hold it are very different Shakespeare touches us, and we crouch with him and hear the Night-jar rattle and the Shrew Mice whistle in the fern in the deer park as we hold our breath to listen for the keepers ; or we stroll along the track of old Aikman Street, across the unenclosed commons of Buckinghamshire, and take Plovers' eggs with a rollicking and not over-respectable company of players on the tramp from Stratford and London ; or loll in the shade and listen to the birds and bees overhead in the branches of the oak trees of Grendon Wood. It is fresh Nature everywhere. Milton takes the wand and the country changes to the town. We smell the leather of dusty piles of learned volumes, and stand half afraid in the presence of the man who could see in the gloom to report for a Parliament of Devils, and look without flinching at " The living throne the sapphire blaze, Where angels tremble as they gaze." But never, even before his blindness, could have had an eye for a bird. But to return to the Nightingale's song. It is a libel to call it sad. As a matter of fact, it's the exact reverse. There are in it, of course, none of the blood- stirring notes of war and crime to be heard in the cry of the Eagle, nor does it, like the wail of the seabird on the hungry shore, carry with it suggestions of Robinson Crusoe adventure ; but it is peaceful, self-sufficing, and perfectly happy home affections and domestic joy set to music. Perhaps to some of us, with boys to start in life, even the curious croak, London Birds. 15 almost like a frog's, which a Nightingale gives every now and then when the young birds are leaving the nest, but only then, may not altogether destroy the truth of the rendering. The beginning of the singing of the Nightingale was, in old Persian calendars, the date for the festival in honour of the return of warm weather. Another night-singing warbler to be found at times in London a pair were seen not long ago in the meadow between the powder magazine and ranger's house in Hyde Park is the Sedge warbler, a pretty little bird, not unlike a Nightingale, with a white line above the eye. " The Sedgebird," writes old Gilbert White, " sings most part of the night : its notes are hurrying, but not unpleasing, and imitative of several birds, as the Sparrow, Swallow, and Sky- lark. When it happens to be silent in the night, by throwing a stone or clod into the bushes where it sits, you immediately set it a singing ; or in other words, though it slumbers sometimes, yet as soon as it is awakened it resumes its song." Another pair lately settled for some little time beside the water in Regent's Park. For six or seven years there has been a Fly Catcher's nest in Rotten Row. The Wren, which, as his name, Regulus, the little king, denotes, has been from earliest times a bird of consideration, is fairly common with us. It was a Wren who shared with Prometheus the honour of bringing fire from heaven, and more than once since, the family has distinguished itself by taking an independent line in public affairs. In the religious disturbances of Charles II.'s time, the Wrens were on the side of the Protestants, and once, " by dancing and pecking on the drums as the enemy approached," saved the lives of a party who would 1 6 London Birds. otherwise certainly have been surprised sleeping, and cut to pieces " by the Popish Irish." " For this reason," says Aubrey, who tells the tale in his Miscellanies, "the wild Irish mortally hate these birds, to this day calling them Devil's Servants, and killing them whenever they catch them." The sympathy of the Lapwings seems to have been as strongly on the other side. They were for the High Church party, and made themselves hated for generations in the lowlands of Scotland as much as were the Wrens in Ireland, by disturbing the devo- tions of the Covenanters, and meanly betraying them again and again to the Duke of York and Commis- sioner Middleton's men, by shrieking on every possible occasion over the lonely meeting-places on the hill- sides. The golden-crested Wren has occasionally, but not often, been seen on the peninsula in St. James's Park. A few Robins, and a Lark, seen on two consecutive days in Hyde Park and the Green Park, complete the list of the Sparrow family in the year's notes on which this chapter is based, though there is no doubt that, with a little longer observation, a great many others might have been added. A Night-jar attended one of the evening performances of Buffalo Bill, hawking about for some time near the seats of the other spectators, at the end of May, 1 892. The " climbers " are not well represented, the only one that was noted during the year being a single vagabond Cuckoo, who found his way into Hyde Park on the 8th of May, and left in the direction of Park Lane. Painful as it is to say unkind things of those we cannot help liking and wish to respect, it is unhappily quite impossible to deny that the Cuckoo is out of all measure a disreputable bird London Birds. 17 She begins life by murdering her foster brothers and sisters, whom she is pretty sure to shuffle one by one on to her hollow back and pitch out of the nest before she is ready to leave it herself. She grows up the charge is proved beyond all question to think as lightly of marriage vows as she does of a mother's duties. Excepting that they have two toes in front and two behind the distinguishing feature of the class the Cuckoos have little or nothing in common with the " climbers " proper ; but a visit from one of them would be just enough to give us a claim to the Woodpeckers as a London family, even if none of the true Woodpeckers were ever to be seen. Stories are still occasionally told of the little spotted Woodpecker, and more frequently of the commoner Green Wood- pecker, having been seen in Kensington Gardens. Probably, at one time, both may not have been un- common there, but their visits are now comparatively rare. A Green Woodpecker was heard and seen in Hyde Park in November, 1885. The birds of the old world, as well as the "two- legged creatures without feathers," are left behind by their more go-ahead American cousins. There is a Californian Woodpecker which is not content with making holes in trees, after the manner of its kind on this side of the Atlantic, but corks them when made. There is a specimen of its work in the British Museum a piece of the bark of a tree with round holes in it neatly stopped with acorns. It is not easy to say what the precise object of the bird in corking his holes may be, unless it is that he has stalled calves grubs not quite at their best when first found fattening in pens for future use. Woodpeckers generally seem to be birds of an enquiring turn of mind. Among the curiosities of 1 8 London Birds. the Leyden Museum is the top of a telegraph post of hard teak, brought from Sumatra, with four or five deep holes drilled round the support of the wire by a little black and white fellow with a red cap, almost identical with our own London " Spotted Woodpecker." His object in drilling the holes was, no doubt, to solve the mystery of the music of the wires, which seems as great a puzzle to four-legged creatures as it is to birds and children ; for in parts of Norway much mischief is done to the telegraphs by bears, which, on the principle that " where there is smoke there is fire," take for granted that where there is a " hum " there must be a bee, and roll away the rocks piled up to keep the posts in their places to get at the hidden honey. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of recent London ornithology has been the increase in the number of Wood Pigeons. When this sketch was first published, not very long ago, it was men- tioned as worth noticing that the " deep mellow crush " of their note had begun to " Make music which sweetened the calm " of Kensington Gardens, where one or two pairs had then lately settled. Now Wood Pigeons nest by dozens in all the parks, and it is a common thing to see fifteen or twenty together in one tree. In our complex civilisation dangers to life and health crop up in such unexpected quarters that it is difficult to say where safety lies. Perhaps, though, the last of our London neighbours whom we should be inclined to suspect of dangerous proclivities, would be the masterless Pigeons, which swarm in all direc- tions. London Birds. 19 But a man may smile and be a villain, and birds are, apparently, no more to be trusted than men. A lady lately took for a few months a house in Chester Square. The drains were duly inspected and pronounced faultless, and she took possession with every prospect of a pleasant season. It was not to be. A cloud of mystery hung over the house. Servants were disturbed by midnight rappings and awaked at daybreak by uncanny whisperings ; and one after another complained of feeling ill, and gave warning. When at last the lady herself had given way to the universal languor, and had, by doctor's advice, left town to seek fresh roses in country air, it was found that there was an unnoticed hole in the outer wall of the house, through which Pigeons had found their way in and out, and that the spaces between floorings and rafters were a big dovecote, evidently of several years' standing. There were living young birds snug in nests on guano beds under the floors, and dead birds in various stages of decay. Fourteen nests were found in the wall of one bedroom. The origin of London tame Pigeons is lost in the mists of antiquity. Dean Gregory, in a paper on the subject, published in one of the church parish maga- zines, traces the colonies on St. Paul's Cathedral of which there are two, one at the east, the other at the west end, which keep carefully apart, and it is said seldom or never intermarry to the Fourteenth Century, when they were already well established. Among other authorities for this he quotes Robert de Braybrooke, Bishop of London, who, in 1385, wrote " there are those who, instigated by a malignant spirit, are busy to injure more than to 2O London Birds. profit, and throw from a distance and hurl stones arrows and various kinds of darts at the crows, pigeons, and other kinds of birds building their nests and sitting on the walls and openings of the church, and in doing so break the glass windows and stone images of the said church." There is a legend that a hole was once neatly drilled in a window, and a bullet embedded in a book-case, within a few feet of the head of a high dignitary of Her Majesty's Civil Service, by a sport- ing young gentleman, who took a flying shot with a saloon pistol at a Pigeon in the quadrangle of Somer- set House. The Wood Pigeons are probably the only wild species of the gallinacice the " poultry " order to which most of our gamebirds belong common in London ; but not long ago there was one very fine fellow to be seen in St. James's Park who deserves special mention. He was a cross between a cock Pheasant and a common hen, and had very nearly the head and neck of his father, with a half-dock tail ; and could fly, if occasion required it, like a genuine rocketer. In the next order, the "waders," we have Moor- hens in plenty. In St. James's Park they are tame, and will scramble with the Ducks for bread from the bridge ; but their habits are more natural in the Long Water. There one may watch them paddling about, jerking their tails or prying about shyly for what they can find on the grass outside the little cover by the water's edge. It is impossible to help believing that a Moorhen has an eye for natural beauties, and chooses the overhanging bough or fallen tree by the water for her nest, for picturesqueness quite as much as for convenience. London Birds. 21 More than one Moorhen has been picked up on the premises of the Public Record Office, in Chancery Lane. It is not necessary to look far for the expla- nation, as the sky overhead is spider-webbed with telegraph wires running in every direction. It is interesting to notice how soon resident birds learn the danger of the wires. When a line was first put up for a few miles along the coast from Cromer, Partridges, Woodcocks, and small birds Larks par- ticularly were constantly picked up more or less mutilated ; but, before the wires had been up many months, it was a rare thing to find a wounded bird. Herons occasionally fly over London ; but it is not likely that they often alight. Like most aboriginal tribes, they are gradually dwindling away before the progress of civilisation ; and soon, if we wish to see them wild, we may have to go to the Dutch ditches or the unreclaimable swamps of America. According to Michelet, whose delightful little book, " L'Oiseau," all bird lovers should read, the Heron knows he is the degenerate representative of a dethroned race of kings; and mopes in solitude, dreaming of the days of his glory, when his ancestors, the giant waders who left their footmarks in the secondary rocks, fought with great lizards and flying dragons, ages before a single mammal had appeared upon the earth. All the birds of which there are any very early traces were of the Heron tribe, and some of them must have been of enormous size. There are three-toed footprints in the red sand- stone of the Connecticut* which are said to " measure * The celebrated Connecticut "Moulds" are now believed " to have been made by certain extinct, in many respects, bird-like reptiles."" The Elements of Ornithology." Mivart 22 London Birds. eighteen inches jn length and nearly thirteen in breadth ; and to indicate, by their distance apart in a straight line, a stride of six feet." "They tell," says Hugh Miller, "of a time far removed into tjhe by-past eternity, when great birds frequented by myriads the shores of a nameless lake, to wade in the shallows in quest of its mail- covered fishes of the ancient type, or long extinct molluscs ; while reptiles, equally gigantic, and of still stranger proportions, haunted the neighbouring swamps ; and when the same sun that shone on the tall moving forms beside the waters, and threw their long shadows across the red sands, lighted up the glades of deep forests, all of whose fantastic pro- ductions tree, bush, and herb have, even in their very species, long since passed away." There is no place in which the birds might be supposed to feel the change of times more than here. The Thames-side in old days must have been a paradise for long-legged birds ; and even chaos itself and the modern world could be scarcely more unlike than the country round the little village of the Trinobantes, and the miles of brick and smoke two old Herns looked down upon, who flapped over London from the Essex marshes one day in August last. It is told in a curious old book, called "Christ's Tears over Jerusalem," published in 1613, that at the time of the Plague of London, "the vulgar meniality concluded that the sickness was like to encrease because a Hern- shaw sate (for a whole afternoon together) on the top of St. Peter's Church in Cornehill." But, adds the writer, "this is naught els but cleanly coined lies." There is a beautiful Heronry not many miles from London, well worth a visit, in Wanstead Park, the property of the City Corporation. London Birds. 23 The ventriloquism of many birds, especially of the Heron and wild fowl tribes, is very strange. In the swampy districts of Finland, one may hear a party 01 Cranes apparently within easy shot, and with diffi- culty make them out almost invisible specks in the sky. Another morning, or very likely the same day the projection of the voice seems to be independent of the state of the atmosphere one hears what sounds a very distant cry, and is startled on looking up to see half-a-dozen great birds streaming along, not a hundred yards overhead. The power, which is no doubt responsible for the legends common all over Europe, of spectral packs of hounds hunting the souls of the lost, is by no means confined to the high-flying birds. It is as impossible to tell from its cry where a Corncrake in a hay-field really may be as it is to guess the exact whereabouts of a passing flock of Geese. There are probably men living still who have shot Snipe where Belgrave Square now stands. It is said that a very little time ago it was not uncommon to flush one in Hyde Park, between Victoria Gate and the Marble Arch ; but the improvements of the last few years have probably banished them, at least till the days of Lord Macaulay's New Zealander. One reads occasionally of Woodcock picked up in the streets. A case of the kind was not long ago recorded in the Field. The poor bird had shared the fate of many of his kind, and had broken his wing against a telegraph wire in flying over at night. Letters in the newspapers recorded that a Wood- cock had flown by Buckingham Palace in the direc- tion of Hyde Park at midday on the 2ist October, 24 London Birds. 1884, and that in May of the same year a Dunlin had been seen feeding by the Serpentine. Passing on to the sixth and last order, the web- footed, the ornamental waters in the parks are so well stocked with the different breeds of Ducks, that it is impossible to say to what extent they are frequented by genuine wild fowl. There is no doubt, though, that the number of occasional visitants is considerable ; and, of those who are permanently quartered on the Serpentine, many fly strongly, and are, to all intents and purposes, wild birds. Unlike most of us, their hours in London and the country are much the same. Flighting time just as the last remains of the blurred red and blue which gives its peculiar picturesqueness to sunset in a big town is fading in the fog is their favourite exercise time ; and one may stand on the Serpentine bridge almost any autumn evening, and listen to Mallard and Widgeon whistling overhead, till, with a very small stretch of imagination, the Long Water becomes a tidal harbour, and the distant roar of Oxford Street changes into the break of the sea outside the sandhills. In St. James's Park alone, besides black and white Swans, and ten sorts of Geese four of them English : Brent, Bean, White-fronted, and Bernicle there are, or were, a very few years ago, not less than nineteen or twenty distinct species of Ducks, with five or six crosses, including one beautiful one between the exquisite little Carolina and red-headed Pochard. About two-thirds are British, ranging in rarity from the Widgeon and Pochards which still swarm in winter in the ponds and runlets in many parts of the coast to the castaneous Ducks and delicately- London Birds. 25 pencilled Gadwall, one of the shiest and rarest of our English waterfowl. The list includes, besides those already mentioned, Mallard, common Teal, and Garganeys, Shovellers, Pintails, the common Shelducks which breed in the rabbit-holes among the sand-hills by the sea, and the [ rarer " Ruddy " species, the tufted ; and, perhaps most generally attractive of all, two or three Golden-eyes, with their brilliant blue-black and white plumage, and the eye, like a little drop of liquid gold, which gives them their name. They and the tufted and Red-headed Pochards are the life of the party, and are scarcely still for a moment together. It is amusing, in a general scramble for bread from the bridge, to watch them diving under the ruck, and popping up to snatch a crust from the very mouth of some sleepy fellow twice their own size, hunted in turn by half a dozen others as wide- awake as themselves. Birds are many of them gifted with the lively imagination which can keep a child happily amused for an hour at a time with a cork on a bit of string for a dog, or " pretenting to be mother." A year or two ago one of the Bernicle Geese in St. James's Park no doubt with a history behind her and not improbably with a shot in the ovary to remind her of some " hair-breadth 'scape " on a frozen marsh in by-gone days made a nest, and, without laying an egg, sat the regulation number of weeks on nothing more suggestive of goslings than the down from her own breast with which she had carefully lined it. The next year, a second nest was made in the same spot, but this time the Providence which makes the woman to whom such family delights had seemed D 26 London Birds. impossible to keep house and be a joyful mother of children, stepped in in the person of the keeper with a clutch of Ducks' eggs, which were safely hatched. For some reason or other the ducklings did not thrive perhaps, because the old maid was too fussily anxious and gave them no peace, or, perhaps (as the keeper who watched them believed to be the case), because her sharp note jarred on ears which nature had designed for a mother's call in another key, frightening the poor little "boarded out" babies and making them restless and before long the foster parents again were childless. A couple of hundred years ago no one, with any pretence to education, would have been foolish enough to expect anything but failure in such an experiment as the park-keepers, Barnicles " fowles like to wylde ghees which growen wonderly vpon trees " being, as every one knew, the excep- tion that proved the rule that birds are hatched from eggs. The belief that the Bernicle Goose grew from the " pedunculated cirripede " that bears its name (Lepas Anatiferd) lingered perhaps the longer because it was good for the Monks of Holy Isle and other northern monastries. " Men of relegyon " we are told in one of Caxton's priceless volumes, "eet Barnacles vpon fastynge days bycause they ben not engendered with flesche." Hudibras made a slip in his natural history when he said that " Bernicles turn Soland geese In th' Islands of the Orcades" ! The first black Swans which were imported from London Birds. 27 Australia could not at all understand the complica- tion of the seasons which a change of hemispheres involved ; and at Carshalton, one brood of little ones was hatched when snow was on the ground, unhappily only to survive in a handsome glass case. They have accommodated themselves to circum- stances better now, and some fine broods have been brought up safely in St. James's Park. The Cygnets in the down are very like young white Swans. A single Tern, noticed one blustering day a few winters ago, and a Stormpetrel, " Mother Carey's Chicken," reported to have been picked up alive in Kensington Gardens in December, 1886, introduce the " Longwings," the poetical family of the Albatross and Frigate bird. Unluckily, the Tern was some distance off, and the species could not be identified with perfect certainty ; but a party of Kittiwakes who paid a well-timed visit to the Serpentine in 1869, when Mr. Sykes's " Sea-birds Preservation Bill " was under discussion, and other parties of the same beautiful birds, which have more than once since stopped for a time in one or other of the parks, have found themselves great people, and had all their movements chronicled in the fashionable news. The party which visited us in 1869 stayed some time, and were watched with pleasure by hundreds. What Campbell wrote of the wild flowers is doubly true of the birds associated with the scenes of child- hood. They can " wake forgotten affections," and " waft us to summers " and winters " of old ; " and probably more than one old Londoner may have felt something not unlike a touch of home-sickness, and found his gas-dried eyes a little more moist than D 2 28 London Birds. usual as he looked at their white breasts glancing in the sunshine. The tame Herring Gulls breed freely in St. James's Park. On the 30th May, 1888, a Cormorant in full breed- ing plumage white patches on cheek and thigh appeared unexpectedly on the water in St. James's Park. He was first noticed by the keeper at half- past eight in the morning, and was tame and hungry enough to accept from him a couple of herrings for breakfast. A bird of the same species, no doubt the same, was seen a few days later on the Serpentine, and again flying over Lord's Cricket Ground in a northerly direction. " The bird," wrote Sir Ralph Payne-Galway, who recorded its last appearance in the Times, " flew fairly low, but owing, I presume, to Mr. Bonnor having just put a ball into the Pavilion, it escaped notice as far as I could judge, though it is true I heard one gentleman remark * there goes a wild Duck.'" Three Cormorants since imported from the Fame Islands have done well in St. James's Park, but have never yet bred or shewn any signs of an intention to breed. Some Guillemots and Puffins were brought at the same time, but, owing to the difficulty in procuring natural food, did not live long. Of the last family of all, the Shortwings the con- necting link between birds and fishes we have at times plenty of a single species, the little Grebe, " Dabchicks," lively little fellows, the quickest and best, perhaps, of our English divers, as much at home at the bottom as above the water. Of late years they have not been coming in such flocks as formerly, but in 1870 there were often as many as one hundred of them at once on the Round London Birds. 29 Pond. They came and went unaccountably, and within a few days the place was alive with them and deserted again. As a rule, though, there were ten or a dozen at least to be seen feeding toler- ably near the edge. They were then common, too, on the other waters in the parks. For the last few years six or seven pairs have bred regularly in St. James's Park. They commonly arrive late in March or early in April, and disappear with their families before the end of October. A nest built in 1887, in an exposed place, was, after it was finished, cut from its original moorings by the builders and towed a yard or two to a more secluded corner under an overhanging bush. Unluckily the second lashings were not so strong as they should have been, and, a fresh breeze springing up, the raft was wrecked and the four eggs it carried went to the bottom. After a sudden sharp frost in March, 1892, a Dabchick a genuinely wild bird in good plumage was found in a shallow puddle in the bed of the ornamental water, which had been run dry for cleaning, with one foot caught in the ice. In the spring of 1883, after a spell of windy weather, a Willock another of the " Brevipennes " was caught alive in Russell Square. Why he came there, unless to prove his title to his other name, " the foolish Guillemot," it is not easy to say. It is a common thing to pick such birds up by twos and threes dead on the beach almost any- where along the coast if it has been blowing hard on shore for any length of time. They, and Razorbills, which, excepting in the form of the beak, are very much like them, are the commonest of the black and white birds which, on almost any voyage northward more particularly 3