A Gathering of Birds

by Donald Culross Peattie

  In the meantime Hudson was still, apparently, in search of a somewhat anachronistic England. He can write pages lamenting that young country women no longer curtsey when they meet you. He longed for an English Nature that began to vanish when William Rufus rounded up the deer of the New Forest. He can look backward as longingly as Jefferies, hate a steel bridge and admire a stone one as ardently as Ruskin. He loved a thatch, and what he knew was the chimney pots of London; he wanted lakes with wild swans, and could but feed bread to tame ones in the London parks. He had longed all his youth to breathe the air of Merrie Engand, and as he says, he had no sooner landed than he could smell it. That smell he later identified as the smell of the pub.

  In this period of unhappiness he met and married Emily Wingrave, a woman with glorious hair, a warm heart, drab origins and a simple intelligence. By the time Hudson became famous she was a fat, sad, uninteresting woman so colorless that she seemed not to be in the room. Few could understand why such a great man had ever picked so null a wife. But it is doubtful if, in his eccentricity and poverty, he had a wide choice. And from her years of patient devotion to him, and of sufferance of his affectionate contempt, one might conclude that Emily married Hudson to take care of him, and kept a Bayswater boarding-house to support him. She did not understand his birds or his writings, his discontents or his genius. But she probably kept him alive in this world from which he would otherwise have departed earlier and with his great work undone.

  The Hudsons had no children, and if they were ever lovers in the common experience of man and woman, that love was brief. So children haunt Hudson’s writings, even his ornithological descriptions, especially little girls whom he loved with the worship and hunger of a man who has none of his own to love as they really are. Contrasted with his chilly and often crotchety relations with women, are the pictures of women in his stories. The immortal Rima of Green Mansions, clad in iridescent cobweb floss or hummingbird plumage, who takes flight in the forest and dies unpossessed, is of course no flesh and blood girl at all but a sort of bird-woman, an evanishing adolescent such as a boy pursues in his dreams but scarcely expects to see when awake. In consequence, Green Mansions is the favorite novel of men who rarely read novels. This idyll is less popular with women and realists, which is not to deny its hypnotic charm.

  There is no need to speak much of Hudson’s crowning years of triumph, still fresh in literary history, when fame and money came to him, and he had to flee from the attentions he had once hungered for pathetically. He died in 1922, at the age of eighty-one, and was buried near Richard Jefferies. Even before his death he had become a sort of saint among many bird lovers, and his name, like Audubon’s and Francis of Assisi’s, has been made to stand for the worship and protection of birds. A bird sanctuary in his name was established in Richmond Park, and a monument was there raised to him with funds given by his admirers, and executed, to the rage and grief of many of them, by Epstein.

  From Hudson’s writings I have chosen one Argentinian selection and one English, to represent the two disparate phases of his life. The selection on the daws has been compounded from two chapters in Birds and Man (1901) and was chosen because the jackdaw seems to me a bird peculiarly European, with its adaptation to the conditions of a dense civilization, and its traits, almost civilized, of audacity and intelligence. One may wish, after Hudson’s account of the preference of daws for cathedral façades, to go back and read “The Jackdaw of Rheims” in Barham’s The Ingoldsby Legends, and learn how a daw stole the bishop’s ring.

  The selection of the golden plover and other migratory birds of the pampas comes from the posthumous A Hind in Richmond Park (1922) and represents Hudson’s most mature and beautiful style. To Americans this passage on the plovers is peculiarly moving, for Hudson’s pampas birds are also North American birds. Only, in North America, they pass the breeding season; Hudson knew them in that other phase of their lives when they have departed from us and gone to another temperate zone, an antipodean sort of prairie, that most of us are as little likely ever to behold as the other side of the moon.

  MIGRATION ON THE PAMPAS

  IT WOULD not be possible for me to convey to readers whose mental image of the visible world and its feathered inhabitants was formed here in England the impression made on my mind, in my early years in the land of my birth, of the spectacle of bird migration as witnessed by me. They have not seen it, nor anything resembling it, therefore cannot properly imagine or visualise it, however well described. I can almost say that when I first opened my eyes it was to the light of heaven and to the phenomenon of bird migration—the sight of it and the sound of it. For migration was then and there on a great, a tremendous scale, and forced itself on the attention of everyone. Nevertheless, it is necessary for me to say something about it before entering into a relation of certain facts concerning migration which other writers on the subject have failed to observe or else ignored.

  Birds, it is granted, migrate north and south, but here in this northern island, cut off from Europe by a comparatively narrow sea, and again by a wider sea from the African continent, the winter home of the majority of our migratory species, it is plain that they could never get to their destination—from England to South Africa, let us say—without deviating a good deal from the north and south direction. America, North, South and Central, is land pretty well all the way north and south from pole to pole, seeing that the only break is a few hundred miles of deep sea between the Magellanic region and the Antarctic continent.

  Migration as I witnessed it was not composed exclusively of South American species: many of the birds were from the northern hemisphere. The rock swallow (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota), for example, that breeds in Arizona and New Mexico, and migrates to southern Patagonia; also the numerous shore birds that breed as far north as the Arctic regions, then migrate south to the Argentine and to the extreme end of Patagonia—or as near as they can get to the Antarctic. The spectacle of the migration of these birds that come to us from another hemisphere—from another world, as it seemed, so many thousand of miles away—was as a rule the most arresting, owing to their extraordinary numbers and to their loquacity, their powerful, penetrative and musical voices—whimbrel, godwit, plover and sandpiper of many species.

  My home was an inland one, a good many miles from the sea-like Plata river, the vast grassy level country of the pampas, the green floor of the world, as I have elsewhere called it. There were no mountains, forests or barren places in that region; it was all grass and herbage, the cardoon and giant thistles predominating; also there were marshes everywhere, with shallow water and endless beds of reeds, sedges and bulrushes—a paradise of all aquatic fowl. Thus, besides the numerous shore birds, the herons of seven species, the crested screamer, the courlan, the rails and coots and grebes, the jacana, the two giant ibises—the stork and wood ibis—and the glossy ibis in enormous flocks, we had two swans, upland geese in winter, and over twenty species of duck. Most of these birds were migratory.

  South America can well be called the great bird continent, and I do not believe that any other large area on it so abounded with bird life as this very one where I was born and reared and saw, and heard, so much of birds from my childhood that they became to me the most interesting things in the world. Thus, the number of species known to me personally, even as a youth, exceeded that of all the species in the British Islands, including the sea or pelagic species that visit our coasts in summer, to breed and spend the rest of the year on the Mediterranean and Atlantic oceans.

  It was not only the number of species known to me, but rather the incalculable, the incredible numbers in which some of the commonest kinds appeared, especially when migrating. For it was not then as, alas! it is now, when all that immense open and practically wild country has been enclosed in wire fences and is now peopled with immigrants from Europe, chiefly of the bird-destroying Italian race. In my time the inhabitants were mostly the natives, the gauchos, descendants of the early Spanish colonists, and they
killed no birds excepting the rhea, which was hunted on horseback with the bolas; and the partridge, or tinamu, which was snared by the boys. There was practically no shooting.

  The golden plover was then one of the abundant species. After its arrival in September, the plains in the neighbor-hood of my home were peopled with immense flocks of this bird. Sometimes in hot summers the streams and marshes would mostly dry up, and the aquatic bird population, the plover included, would shift their quarters to other districts. During one of these droughty seasons, when my age was nine, there was a marshy ground two miles from my home where a few small pools of water still remained, and to this spot the golden plover would resort every day at noon. They would appear in flocks from all quarters, flying to it like starlings in England coming in to some great roosting centre on a winter evening. I would then mount my pony and gallop off joyfully to witness the spectacle. Long before coming in sight of them the noise of their voices would be audible, growing louder as I drew near. Coming to the ground, I would pull up my horse and sit gazing with astonishment and delight at the spectacle of that immense multitude of birds, covering an area of two or three acres, looking less like a vast flock than a floor of birds, in colour a rich deep brown, in strong contrast to the pale grey of the dried up ground all round them. A living, moving floor and a sounding one as well, and the sound too was amazing. It was like the sea, but unlike it in character since it was not deep; it was more like the wind blowing, let us say, on thousands of tight-drawn wires of varying thicknesses, vibrating them to shrill sound, a mass and tangle of ten thousand sounds. But it is indescribable and unimaginable.

  Then I would put the birds up to enjoy the different sound of their rushing wings mingled with that of their cries, also the sight of them like a great cloud in the sky above me, casting a deep shadow on the earth.

  The golden plover was but one of many equally if not more abundant species in its own as well as other orders, although they did not congregate in such astonishing numbers. On their arrival on the pampas they were invariably accompanied by two other species, the Eskimo curlew and the buff-breasted sandpiper. These all fed in company on the moist lands, but by-and-by the curlews passed on to more southern districts, leaving their companions behind, and the buff-breasted sand pipers were then seen to be much less numerous than the plover, about one bird to ten.

  Now one autumn, when most of the emigrants to the Arctic breeding-grounds had already gone, I witnessed a great migration of this very species—this beautiful sandpiper with the habits of a plover. The birds appeared in flocks of about one to two or three hundred, flying low and very swiftly due north, flock succeeding flock at intervals of about ten or twelve minutes; and this migration continued for three days, or, at all events, three days from the first day I saw them, at a spot about two miles from my home. I was amazed at their numbers, and it was a puzzle to me then, and has been one ever since, that a species thinly distributed over the immense area of the Argentine pampas and Patagonia could keep to that one line of travel over that uniform green, sea-like country. For, outside of that line, not one bird of the kind could anywhere be seen; yet they kept so strictly to it that I sat each day for hours on my horse watching them pass, each flock first appearing as a faint buff-coloured blur or cloud just above the southern horizon, rapidly approaching then passing me, about on a level with my horse’s head, to fade out of sight in a couple of minutes in the north; soon to be succeeded by another and yet other flocks in endless succession, each appearing at the same point as the one before, following the same line, as if a line invisible to all eyes except their own had been traced across the green world for their guidance. It gave one the idea that all the birds of this species, thinly distributed over tens of thousands of square miles of country, had formed the habit of assembling, previous to migration, at one starting-point, from which they set out in successive flocks of a medium size, in a disciplined order, on that marvellous journey to their Arctic breeding-grounds.

  Among the other species that swarmed in all the marshy places the glossy ibis was the most abundant, so that the whole air seemed laden with the strong musky smell of their plumage. In the autumn I have often watched their migration, usually in flocks of fifty to a hundred birds; and these would continue passing for hours, flying at a height of twenty or thirty feet, and invariably, on coming to water, dropping down and sweeping low over the surface as if wanting to alight and refresh themselves, but unable to overcome the impulse urging them to the north, they would rise again and travel on.

  Then there were the species that had only a partial migration; birds that were residents all the year with us, but were migrants from the colder country to the south. One was our common dove (Zenaida), seen passing in flocks of many thousands; and, among the small birds, the common parasitical cow-bird. The entire plumage of this species is a deep glossy purple which looks black at a little distance, and in late autumn, when great flocks visited our plantation, the large bare trees would sometimes look as if they had suddenly put on an inky-black foliage. This bird too, when migrating from the southern pampas and Patagonia, would appear and pass in an endless series of flocks, travelling low and filling the air with the musical murmur of their wings and the musky smell which they too, like the ibis, give out from their plumage.

  But of the smaller birds with a limited or partial migration, the military starling on his travels impressed and delighted me the most. Like a starling in shape, but larger than that bird, it has a dark plumage and scarlet breast. On the approach of winter it would appear all over the plains, not travelling in the manner of other migrants, speeding through the air, but feeding on the ground, probing the turf as starlings do, the whole flock drifting northwards at the same time. The flock, often numbering many hundreds of birds, would spread itself out, showing a long front line of scarlet breasts all turned one way, while the birds furthest in the rear would be continually flying on to drop down in advance of those at the front, so that every two or three minutes a new front line would be formed, and in this way the entire body, or army, would be slowly but continuously progressing.

  How pleasant it was in those vanished years of an abundant bird life, when riding over the plain in winter, to encounter those loose, far-spread flocks with their long lines of red breasts showing so beautifully on the green sward! My memories of this bird alone would fill a chapter.

  The autumnal migration, which was always a more impressive spectacle than that of the spring, began in February when the weather was still hot, and continued for three long months; for after the departure of all our own birds, the south Patagonian species that wintered with us or passed on their way to districts further north would begin to come in. During all these three long months the sight and sound of passage birds was a thing of every day, of every hour, so long as the light lasted, and after dark from time to time the cries of the night-travellers came to us from the sky—the weird laughter-like cry of rails, the shrill confused whistling of a great flock of whistling or tree duck; and, most frequent of all, the beautiful wild trisyllabic alarm cry of the upland plover.

  Of this bird, the last on my list for this chapter, I must write at greater length; in the first place, for the purely sentimental reason that it was the one I loved best, and secondly, on account of the leading place it came to occupy in my mind when I thought about the problem of migration. It inhabits, or formerly inhabited, a great portion of the United States of North America, its summer or breeding home, then migrated south all the way to southern Argentina and Patagonia, and it was, I believe, most abundant on the great level pampas where I had my home. In North America it is known as the upland plover, and is also called the solitary plover and Bartram’s sandpiper—for a sandpiper it is, albeit with the habits of a plover and a preference for dry lands. In the Argentine its vernacular name is Batitu, from its trisyllabic alarm note—one of the most frequently heard sounds on the pampas. It is a charming bird, white and grey with brown and yellow mottlings on its upper plumage,
beautiful in its slender graceful form, with a long tail and long swallow-like pointed wings. All its motions are exceedingly graceful: it runs rapidly as a corncrake before the rider’s horse, then springs up with its wild musical cry to fly but twenty or thirty yards away and drop down again, to stand in a startled attitude flirting its long tail up and down. At times it flies up voluntarily, uttering a prolonged bubbling and inflected cry, and alights on a post or some such elevated place to open and hold its wings up vertically and continue for some time in that attitude—the artist’s conventional figure of an angel.

  These birds never flocked with us, even before departing; they were solitary, sprinkled evenly over the entire country, so that when out for a day on horseback I would flush one from the grass every few minutes; and when travelling or driving cattle on the pampas I have spent whole weeks on horseback from dawn to dark without being for a day out of sight or sound of the bird. When migrating its cry was heard at all hours from morning to night, from February till April: and again at night, especially when there was a moon.

  Lying awake in bed, I would listen by the hour to that sound coming to me from the sky, mellowed and made beautiful by distance and the profound silence of the moonlit world, until it acquired a fascination for me above all sounds on earth, so that it lived ever after in me; and the image of it is as vivid in my mind at this moment as that of any bird call or cry, or any other striking sound heard yesterday or but an hour ago. It was the sense of mystery it conveyed which so attracted and impressed me—the mystery of that delicate, frail, beautiful being, travelling in the sky, alone, day and night, crying aloud at intervals as if moved by some powerful emotion, beating the air with its wings, its beak pointing like the needle of the compass to the north, flying, speeding on its seven-thousand-mile flight to its nesting home in another hemisphere.