Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  “Excuse my asking a delicate question, but do you do much damage, from the farmer’s point of view, to the crops and the gardens? You see, we men have a narrow-minded way of regarding these things from a somewhat restricted human standpoint.”

  The sparrow gazed at me hard out of the corner of his eye. “Well, I don’t want it put in print,” he said confidentially, “for farmers are so unreasonable; but I will admit that at certain times of the year we do pick up a good many seeds out of fields and gardens. But then, consider how many insects we help to eat up. Why, I lived for a week last year upon aphides — what the farmers call bean-bugs. We must be philosophical, my dear sir; we must be philosophical. There’s a give-and-take in these affairs, you may depend upon it.”

  He ruffled his neck as he spoke, and I observed it was marked by a conspicuous black band I had never before noticed.

  “That’s a pretty cravat of yours,” I interposed, just to change the subject.

  “Yes, it is pretty,” he admitted, swelling himself out a bit as he said it. “Our women don’t have them, you know, nor the young ones either. This beautiful decoration is the peculiar glory and special distinction of the adult cock-sparrow.” And anything cockier than he looked at that moment it would be hard to imagine.

  It occurred to me as he spoke that I had seldom seen a slenderer form of masculine adornment on which to pride one’s self, till I suddenly recollected that a black moustache on a human face must be as relatively inconspicuous to any other species; and I have never noticed that the possessors of well-grown black moustaches under-rated their importance.

  “You have a large family, I believe,” I remarked, as he chirped to his mate cheerily.

  “Oh, several of them,” he answered with a nonchalant air; “sometimes as many as three yearly. We are a dominant race, you know, and we don’t always trouble to build our own nests; we just drive out a house-martin, or take possession of a sand-martin’s burrow in a cutting. Arbitrary, did you say? Oh, well, you see, we are sparrows; and, of course, we can make a much better use of them. Poor devils of martins, they have to go elsewhere, and house themselves as best they may — the survivors, that is to say, for a good many of them get killed and torn to pieces in the process of readjustment. They’re such savages, you see; we’re obligea to be sharp with them. Why, I’ve known a horde of house-martins fight in defence of their wretched mud hovels till we were compelled to exterminate them. Well, I’m off now; ta-ta! Mind you send me a copy of your paper with this interview. And oh, by the way, if you describe my wife, just make the most you can of that pale streak over her eye, will you? It is all she has to be proud of, poor thing. She’s not as distinguished-looking as I am, of course; but let her down gently, please; do let her down gently.”

  XXXI. THE GREEN WOODPECKER.

  We live so closely and familiarly with nature on the isolated hilltop, where my cottage is perched, that we often behold from our own drawing-room windows pretty rural sights, which seem intensely strange to more town-bred visitors. A little while since, for example, I was amused at reading in an evening newspaper a lament by a really well-informed and observant naturalist on the difficulty of actually seeing the night-jar, or fern-owl, alight upon a tree, and stand, as is his wont, lengthwise, not transversely to the branch that bears him. Now, from our little bay lattice that doubting Thomas might see the weird bird nightly, not twenty yards off, the whole summer through, crooning its passionate song, full in view of our house, from a gnarled old fir-tree. So again this morning, at breakfast, we raised our eyes from the buttered eggs and coffee, and they fell at once on a big green woodpecker, creeping upward, after his fashion, along a russet-brown pine-trunk, not fifteen feet from the place at table where we were quietly sitting. One could make out with the naked eye the dark olive-green of his back, relieved by the brilliant crimson patch on his gleaming crown. For several minutes he stood there, clambering slowly up the tree, though we rose from our seats and approached quite close to the open window to examine him. When he turned his head, and listened intently after his tapping, with that characteristic air of philosophic inquiry which marks his species, the paler green of his under parts flashed for a second upon us; and when at last, having satisfied himself there was nothing astir under the bark of the stunted pine, he flew away to the next clump, we caught the glint of his wings and the red cap on his head in motion through the air with extraordinary distinctness.

  The yaffle, as we call our red-headed friend in these parts, is one of the largest and handsomest of our woodland wild birds. About a foot in length, by the actual measurement, “from the end of his beak to the tip of his tail,” he hardly impresses one at first sight with a sense of his full size, because of his extreme concinnity and neatness of plumage. A practical bird, he is built rather for use than for vain gaudy display; for, though his colour is fine, and evidently produced by many ages of æsthetic selection, he yet sedulously avoids all crests and top-knots, all bunches and bundles of decorative feathers protruding from his body, which would interfere with his solid and business-like pursuit of wood-burrowing insects. How well-built and how cunningly evolved he is, after all, for his special purpose! His feet are so divided into opposite pairs of toes — one couple pointing forward and the other backward — that he can easily climb even the smooth-barked beech-tree, by digging his sharp claws into any chance inequality in its level surface. He alights head upward, and moves on a perpendicular plane as surely and mysteriously as a lizard. Nothing seems to puzzle him; the straightest trunk becomes as a drawing-room floor to his clinging talons. But in his climbing he is also aided not a little by his stiff and starched tail, whose feathers are so curiously rigid, like a porcupine’s quills, that they enable him to hold on and support himself behind with automatic security. Long ancestral habit has made it in him “a property of easiness.” A practised acrobat from the egg, he thinks nothing of such antics; and when he wishes to descend he just lets himself drop a little, like a sailor on a rope, sliding down head uppermost, and stopping himself when he wishes by means of his claws and tail, as the sailor stops himself by tightening his bent fingers and clinging legs round the cable he is descending.

  But, best of all, I love to watch him tapping after insects. How wise he looks then! how intent! how philosophic! When he suspects a grub, he hammers awhile at the bark; after which he holds his head most quaintly on one side with a quiet gravity that always reminds me of John Stuart Mill listening, all alert, to an opponent’s argument, and ready to pounce upon him. If a grub stirs responsive to the tap, tap, tap of his inquiring bill — if his delicate ear detects a cavity, as a doctor detects a weak spot in a lung with his prying stethoscope — in a second our bird has drilled a hole with that powerful augur, his wedge-shaped beak, has darted out his long and extensile tongue, and has extracted the insect by means of its barbed and bristled tip. The whole of this mechanism, indeed, is one of the most beautiful examples I know of structures begotten by long functional use, and perfected by the action of natural selection. It is not only that the bill is a most admirable and efficient boring instrument; it is not only that the tongue is capable of rapid and lightning-like protrusion; but further still, the barbs at its ends are all directed backward, like the points of a harpoon, while the very same muscles which produce the instantaneous forward movement of the tongue press at the same time automatically on two large salivary glands, which pour forth in response a thick and sticky secretion, not unlike bird-lime. The insect, once spotted, has thus no chance of escape; he is caught and devoured before he can say “Jack Robinson” in his own dialect.

  But though the green woodpecker is so exceedingly practical and sensible a bird, built all for use and very little for show, he is not wholly devoid of those external adornments which are the result of generations of æsthetic preference. Dominant types always show these peculiarities. His ground-tone of green, indeed, serves, no doubt, a mainly protective function, by enabling him to escape notice among the leaves of the woodlan
d; and even on a tree-trunk he readily assimilates with the tone of the background; but his brilliant crimson cap is a genuine piece of decorative adornment, which owes its origin, no doubt, to the selective preferences of his female ancestors for endless generations.

  XXXII. THE HAREBELL.

  Few English flowers are better known than the harebell; yet I wonder what proportion of all those who love it well in its summer beauty would be able to account for its botanical name of Round-leaved Campanula. “Round-leaved!” most people would say; “why, its leaves are slender and narrow and grass-like.” And so they are, indeed, in the later state in which you pick in July the graceful pensile blossoms. But the flowering stage of every plant is, after all, but its momentary reproductive period; it represents, so to speak, the golden prime of the full-grown individual. Before that stage is attained, the plant itself has to grow and prepare for flowering; it has to pass through its adolescence and its formative epoch. Now, the harebell is a herb whose two ages of life are singularly different; if you saw it in its green youth, when it is devoting itself wholly to feeding and storage, you would never imagine it was the self-same plant as that whose tall and very slender stem supports in later life the scattered group of drooping blue bell-flowers with which you are familiar.

  Here on the dry sandbank, beside the path that runs obliquely across the moor, I see half a dozen harebell-worts in the first, or caterpillar, stage of their existence. The metaphor is less violent by far than you would at first imagine, for in its earlier days the harebell, like the caterpillar, does nothing but eat and lay by for the future; while in its second or flowering stage it does nothing but put forth its tender blue blossoms, which answer to the butterfly both in their attractive beauty and in the fact that they serve to produce the seeds (which are the analogues of eggs) for the coming generation. In the purely preparatory, or hard-eating, stage, the harebell has no stem or branches to speak of; it consists of a rosette of large orb-like leaves, often heart-shaped towards the stalk, and pressed close to the ground in a spreading circle. Each such rosette springs in April from a buried rootstock, which, in loose loamy soil, like that of these Surrey moors, is often intricate; it burrows in and out with strange instinct among the dry sand and stones, in search of such rare moisture as it can manage to find for itself. But though water is scarce, access to light and air is easy; so the large round leaves, lying close on the bare ground, get sunshine in abundance, and feed to their hearts’ content upon their proper food — the carbon in the atmosphere — while vegetation around is still low and backward. In this stage they may be compared to the rosettes of London-pride, which are similarly clustered, but which do not die down as the flower-stem advances.

  About June, however, the harebell plant has eaten and drunk enough to venture upon leaving its caterpillar stage behind, and sending up the loose cluster of waving blue flowers which represent its butterfly. In order to do this, and overtop the tall grasses which have sprouted meanwhile, it withdraws the whole of the living green-stuff from its heart-shaped root-leaves, and uses up the active material they contain in building its flower-stem. Thus, as the stem lengthens, and the buds begin to swell, the lower leaves die away altogether; only a few quite dissimilar and very narrow blades on the ascending branches now represent the original foliage. After the flowers have set, even these last disappear, or dry up on the stem, their living material being withdrawn in turn to supply food for the developing seeds. This may seem odd at first, but it is a common incident in many life-histories of plants and animals. As a rule, indeed, the butterfly or winged stage of most insect lives is wholly devoted to a marriage flight; and there are several winged insects which never feed at all in the perfect state; they use themselves up in the formation of eggs, and then die of inanition.

  Most of the sister campanulas, like Canterbury bells, are stiff and coarse and hairy plants, without grace or elegance; but that is because they haunt woods and copses, or overgrown hedgerows, where they are sheltered from the wind, and enabled to grow large and rampant. The harebell, on the contrary — the oread of its race — is a denizen of the open, wind-swept uplands; it loves the moors and heaths, the bare hilly pastures; and it has learnt in consequence to bend lightly before the breeze, springing up again as those invisible feet pass on, which gives it its familiar slenderness and elegance. The hanging domes of the flowers are entered from below by bumble-bees, which are strong enough to push aside the fringed and close-set teeth that edge the base of the stamens, put there on purpose to baffle less useful honey-thieving visitors. Equally strange is the egg-shaped capsule which, later on, contains the seeds; it opens by five short clefts near the top. The actual reason for this arrangement is itself a somewhat odd one. The seeds can only drop out through the pores or clefts when a high wind blows and sways the waving stem violently. At such times the little grains get carried by the breeze to considerable distances; and this serves not only to disseminate the kind, but also to carry the majority of the seeds to unoccupied spots, where rotation of crops can thus be secured by letting the young plants sprout at a distance from the soil exhausted by their mother. Similar devices for securing rotation are common in nature; they often occur in species like this, whose seeds seem at first sight wholly unprovided with wings, or floats, or other means of locomotion.

  XXXIII. THE UNTAMABLE SHREW.

  By the hedgerow in the garden my terrier, Freckle, has just come across two pugnacious shrews, engaged in one of their sanguinary battles. The high belligerent parties are not exactly formidable to outsiders, it is true, being not quite three inches long apiece from snout to haunches, not counting an inch and a half of tail, oddly square in outline, to finish off their appearance. Yet they are savage fighters, for all that, in their intertribal quarrels. When shrew meets shrew, then comes the tug of war. It very seldom happens that they do not join battle, and the victor in the fray usually kills and eats his discomfited rival. So fierce a heart in so small a body is rare, but the shrew knows not what fear means. This particular pair of combatants were so automatically intent on the fortunes of war that Freckle was upon them and investigating their nature with her inquisitive nose before they even woke up to the fact of her presence.

  Most people seem to confuse shrews with mice; but, indeed, our small combatants are widely different creatures from those timid little beasts; they belong to a wholly different group of mammals. Mice are rodents, descendants of the same common ancestor with the rats and dormice, and not remotely related to the squirrels and the rabbits. Shrews, on the other hand, are insectivores, first cousins of the moles, the hedgehogs, and the desmans. Externally, it is true, they resemble considerably the mice and voles; but those who have followed the course of recent natural history must be aware by this time that “appearances are deceitful.” If an animal looks very much like something else, the chances are that it is altogether different. This is particularly the case with the insectivores and the marsupials, each of which great groups has independently developed a series of forms absurdly like the mice, the squirrels, the porcupines, and the jerboas, because each fills approximately the same place in nature. For example, small mammals which creep about among grass and matted herbage are likely to assume a mouse-like shape. This has happened among rodents in the case of the mice and field-voles, among insectivores in the case of the shrews, and among Australian marsupials in the case of the pouched kangaroo-mice. Our English shrew is a pretty little creature of this common type, with thick soft fur like a mouse’s, only a trifle redder, and so mousey in shape that it is seldom discriminated from the true mice, save by naturalists and gamekeepers. Even externally, however, it differs much from mice in its long pointed snout — a marked insectivorous feature — as well as in its square and abruptly cut-off tail, where the mouse’s is rounded, tapering, and slender. When you come to the teeth and internal anatomy, however, the creature is an insectivore, displaying at once quite a separate character.

  Mice, as everybody knows, feed mainly on seeds and
grains, though they are fairly omnivorous, and do not despise either bees or beetles. But the shrew, less promiscuous, eschews all vegetable foods; he makes his diet entirely of insects, worms, and slugs, of which he devours an incredible number. Hence he haunts for the most part dry fields and gardens, where such prey is abundant. His preference is also for a soft sandy or light loamy soil, in which he can burrow with ease with the muzzle alone, for his slender feet are ill adapted for digging through hard earth or clay. A relative of the mole, he makes long runs, like his cousin, through the soft surface-soil in search of insects; but, unlike the mole again, he has preserved his small, keen eyes intact, and lives, on the whole, as much above ground as beneath it. Yet his cousinship stands him in small stead with his big purblind relation; for moles catch and eat shrews in considerable numbers. This is not to be wondered at, perhaps, when one reflects that the unnatural shrews also eat one another. Cannibalism, indeed, is an unamiable trait common to man and the insectivores. Weasels, owls, and cats are also great shrew-killers; though, strange to say, the shrew, when killed, is by no means always eaten. I put this down in the main to the powerful scent-glands, which run along the side of the body, or occur at the root of the tail, in most species of shrew, and which secrete a very strong and odorous liquid. This liquid, I fancy, is partly protective, partly attractive to the opposite sex. It would seem to be distasteful to outsiders, but not unpleasant to insectivores themselves, for cats will kill a shrew from pure love of sport, or by mistake for a mouse, but will seldom or never eat it, whereas shrews themselves and moles have no such prejudice. Owls, also, eat shrews, in spite of their flavour. I believe such sexually attractive scents almost always coexist with the pugnacious temperament. All musky-perfumed animals fight savagely with one another for possession of their females, as do also those with marked frills or top-knots.