W. H. Hudson

“ I shall ask for no other song, but there will be other creatures there. Down the tall grey trunk of a beech tree before me a squirrel will slip—down, down nearly to the mossy roots, then pause and remain so motionless as to seem like a squirrel-shaped patch of bright chestnut-red moss or lichen or alga on the grey bark. And on the next tree, but a little distance off, I shall presently catch sight of another listener and watcher—a green woodpecker clinging vertically against the trunk, so still as to look like a bird figure carved in wood and painted green and gold and crimson. ”

“ One afternoon, a couple of miles out, I was on the top of Barrow Hill in a sudden, violent storm of rain and wind; when the rain ceased, the sun burst out behind me, and the town, rain-wet and sun-flushed, shone white as a city built of whitest marble against the green hills and black cloud on the farther side. Then on the slaty blackness appeared a complete and most brilliant rainbow, on one side streaming athwart the green hill and resting on the centre of the town, so that the high, old, richly-decorated Abbey Church was seen through a band of green and violet mist. ”

“ They know it so well, even without having seen it; the little, old-world village at the foot of the long, steep, bank-like hill, or Hanger, clothed to its summit with beech-wood as with a green cloud; the straggling street, the Plestor, or village green, an old tree in the centre, with a bench surrounding its trunk for the elders to rest on of a summer evening. And, close by, the grey immemorial church, with its churchyard, its grand old yew-tree, and, overhead, the bunch of swifts, rushing with jubilant screams round the square tower. ”

“ The raven suddenly closes his outspread wings, just as a man might drop his arms to his sides, and falls head downwards through the air like a stone bird cast down from its pedestal; but he falls obliquely, and, after falling for a space of twenty or thirty or more feet, he throws out his wings and floats for a few seconds on the air, then falls again, and then again, until the earth is reached. ”

“ This low level strip of country is mostly pasture-land, and is drained by endless ditches, full of reeds and sedges growing in the stagnant sherry-coloured water; dwarf hawthorn grows on the banks of the ditches, and is the only tree vegetation. Standing on one of the wide flat green fields or spaces, at a distance from the sandy dyke or ditch, it is strangely silent. Unless a lark is singing near, there is no sound at all; but it is wonderfully bright and fragrant where the green level earth is yellowed over with cowslips, and you get the deliciousness of that flower in fullest measure. ”

“ The continuous singing of a skylark at a vast height above the green, billowy sun and shadow-swept earth is an etherealised sound which fills the blue space, fills it and falls, and is part of that visible nature above us, as if the blue sky, the floating clouds, the wind and sunshine, has something for the hearing as well as for the sight. And as the lark in its soaring song is of the sky, so the wood wren is of the wood. ”

“ Is it not time to say to these "little children" that they must find a new toy—a fresh amusement to fill their vacant hours: that birds—living flying birds—are a part of nature, of this visible world in this island, the dwelling-place of some forty-five or fifty millions of souls; that these millions have a right in the country's wild life too—surely a better one than that of a few hundreds of gentlemen of leisure who have money to hire gamekeepers, bird-stuffers, wild-fowlers, and many others, to break the law for them, and to take the punishment when any is given? ”

“ A sprite-like bird in his slender exquisite shape and his beautiful fits of excitement; fantastic in his motions as he flits and flies from spray to spray, now hovering motionless in the air like the wooing gold-crest, anon dropping on a perch, to sit jerking his long tail, his crest raised, his throat swollen, chiding when he sings and singing when he chides, like a refined and lesser sedge warbler in a frenzy, his slate-black and chestnut-red plumage showing rich and dark against the pure luminous yellow of the massed furze blossoms. ”

“ Wells has the first place in my affections, and is the one town in England the sight of which in April and early May, from a neighbouring hill, has caused me to sigh with pleasure. Its cathedral is assuredly the loveliest work of man in this land, supremely beautiful, even without the multitude of daws that make it their house, and may be seen every day in scores, looking like black doves perched on the stony heads and hands and shoulders of that great company of angels and saints, apostles, kings, queens, and bishops, that decorate the wonderful west front. ”

“ In an hour or so there would be forty or fifty birds forming a flock, each couple always keeping close together, some sitting on the short grass, others standing, all very quiet. At length one bird in the flock, a male, would all at once begin to move his head in a slow, measured manner from side to side, like a pianist swaying his body in time to his own music. ”

“ The forest is nature's and yours. There you are at liberty to ramble all day unchallenged by any one; to walk, and run to warm yourself; to disturb a herd of red deer, or of fallow deer, which are more [Pg_82] numerous; to watch them standing still to gaze back at you, then all with one impulse move rapidly away, showing their painted tails, keeping a kind of discipline, row behind row, moving over the turf with that airy tripping or mincing gait that strikes you as quaint and somewhat bird-like. ”

“ It is a leaf that refuses to die wholly. When separated from the tree it has, if not immortality, at all events a second, longer life. Oak and ash and chestnut leaves fade from month to month and blacken, and finally rot and mingle with the earth, while the beech leaf keeps its sharp clean edges unbroken, its hard texture and fiery colour, its buoyancy and rustling incisive sound. ”

“ In the chapter referred to it was said, "When the eye closes in death, the bird, except to the naturalist, becomes a mere bundle of dead feathers; crystal globes may be put into the empty sockets, and a bold life-imitating attitude given to the stuffed specimen, but the vitreous orbs shoot forth no life-like glances: the 'passion and the life whose fountains are within' have vanished, and the best work of the taxidermist, who has given a life to his bastard art, produces in the mind only sensations of irritation and disgust." ”

“ When this interposing mist is not present, who can fail to admire the goose—that stately bird-shaped monument of clouded grey or crystal white marble, to be seen standing conspicuous on any village green or common in England? For albeit a conquered bird, something of the ancient wild and independent spirit survives to give him a prouder bearing than we see in his fellow feathered servants. ”

“ My own experience proves that it is not so; that a man may cut himself off from the bird life he knows, to make his home in another region of the globe thousands of miles away, and after a period exceeding a quarter of a century, during which he has become intimate with a wholly different bird life, to find that the old sound-images, which have never been refreshed with new sense-impressions, are as distinct as they ever were, and seem indeed imperishable. ”

“ That low land is on a level with the sea, and is the flattest bit of country in England, not even excepting the Ely district. Apart from the charm which flatness has in itself for some persons—it has for me a very great charm on account of early associations—there is much here to attract the lover of nature. It is the chief haunt and paradise of the reed warbler, one of our sweetest songsters, and here his music may be heard amid more perfect surroundings than in any other haunt of the bird known to me in England. ”

“ They are a numerous and a vociferous colony, but the noise of their loudest cawings, when they rush out like a black cloud and are most excited, is almost drowned by the louder roar of the torrent beneath—the river's great cry of liberty and joy on issuing from the blackness in the hollow of the hills into the sunshine of heaven and the verdure of that beautiful valley. ”

“ And with nature, in and around the rustic village-like city, live the birds. The green woodpecker laughs aloud from the group of old cedars and pines, hard by the cathedral close—you will not hear that woodland sound in any other city in the kingdom; and the rooks caw all day from the rookery in the old elms that grow at the side of the palace moat. But the cathedral daws, on account of their numbers, are the most important of the feathered inhabitants of Wells. ”

“ I believe that this sympathy exists and is just as strong between a cow and its small volatile companion, the wagtail, as between a bird and mammal that more nearly resemble each other in size; for instance, the partridge, or pheasant, and rabbit.
The only bird with us that appears to have some such feeling of pleasure in the company of man is the robin. It is not universal, not even very common, and Macgillivray, in speaking of the confidence in men of that bird during severe weather, very truly says, "In ordinary times he is not perfectly disposed to trust in man." ”

“ It is true, as an observant gamekeeper once said to me, that if there are as many as half a dozen to a dozen jays in any wood they will contrive to hold a meeting; but when the birds are few and much persecuted, it is difficult to see and hear them at such times, and when seen and heard, no adequate idea is formed of the beauty of their displays, and the power and variety of their language, as witnessed in localities where they are numerous, and fear of the keeper's gun has not damped their mad, jubilant spirits. ”

“ We keep a swan or a peacock for ornament; a goose for the table—he is the Michaelmas and Christmas bird. A somewhat similar debasement has fallen on the sheep in Australia. To the man in the bush he is nothing but a tallow-elaborating organism, whose destiny it is to be cast, at maturity, into the melting vat, and whose chief use it is to lubricate the machinery of civilisation. It a little shocks, and at the same time amuses, our Colonial to find that great artists in the parent country admire this most unpoetic beast, and waste their time and talents in painting it. ”

“ A man walking by the water-side sees by chance a kingfisher fly past, its colour a wonderful blue, far surpassing in beauty and brilliancy any blue he has ever seen in sky or water, or in flower or stone, or any other thing. ”

“ During these autumn evenings the children at this spot appeared to drop naturally into the owl's note, just as in spring in all parts of England they take to mimicking the cuckoo's call. Children are like birds of a social and loquacious disposition in their fondness for a set call, a penetrative cry or note, by means of which they can converse at long distances. But they have no settled call of their own, no cry as distinctive as that of one of the lower animals. They mimic some natural sound. ”

“ The skin, too, needed some beautiful colour, and there were red as well as blue flowers in the bunch; and the red flowers being most abundant in nature and in greater variety of tints, give us altogether more pleasure than their beautiful rivals in our affection.
The blue flower is associated, consciously or not, with the human blue eye; and as the floral blue is in all or nearly all instances pure and beautiful, it is like the most beautiful human eye. This association, and not the colour itself, strikes me as the true cause of the superior attraction which the blue flower has for most of us. ”

“ All the sounds that nature utters are delightful, at least in this country. I should not perhaps find the roaring of lions in Africa, or of bears in Russia, very pleasing; but I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account as musical, save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and fowls please me, without one exception. I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage that I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farmyard, is no bad performer ”

“ When the spring-feeling is in the blood, infecting us with vague longings for we know not what; when we are restless and seem to be waiting for some obstruction to be removed—blown away by winds, or washed away by rains—some change that will open the way to liberty and happiness,—the feeling not unfrequently takes a more or less definite form: we want to go away somewhere, to be at a distance from our fellow-beings, and nearer, if not to the sun, at all events to wild nature. At such times I think of all the places where I should like to be, and one is Savernake ”

“ I have named few flowers, and those all the most familiar kinds, because it seemed to me that many examples would have had a confusing effect on readers who do not intimately know many species, or do not remember the exact colour in each case, and are therefore unable to reproduce in their minds the exact expression—the feeling which every flower conveys. On the other hand, the reader who knows and loves flowers, who has in his mind the distinct images of many scores, perhaps of two or three hundreds of species, can add to my example many more from his own memory. ”