Chapter 10
CHAPTER X. Great Bustard, Stone Curlew, Big Hawks, former abundance of the Raven, Dogs Fed on Carrion, Ravens Fighting, Ravens Breeding-Places in Wiltshire, Great Ridgewood Ravens, Field Fair Breeding in Wiltshire, Puit, Missle Thrush, Magpie and Turtle Dove, Gamekeepers and Magpies, Rooks and Farmers, Starling, the Shepherd's favorite bird, Sparrowhawk and Brown Thrush.
Wiltshire, like other places in England, has long been deprived of its most interesting birds, the species that were best worth preserving. This great bustard, once our greatest bird, even greater than the Golden and Sea Eagles, and the giant crane with its trumpet sound, once heard in the land, is now but a memory, or a place name.
Bustard N, no longer an inn, is well known to the many thousands who now go to the mimic wars on Salisbury Plain, and there is a Trappist monastery in a village on the southernmost border of the county, which was once called and is still known to old men as Bustard Farm. All that Caleb Balcom knew of this grandest bird is what his father had told him, and Isaac knew of it only from hearsay, although it was still met with in South Wiltshire when
he was a young man. The Stone Curlew, our little bustard with the long wings, big yellow eyes and wild voice, will frequence the uncultivated downs, unhappily in diminishing numbers, for the private collector's desire to possess British-taken bird's eggs does not diminish. I doubt if more than one clutch in ten escapes the searching eyes of the poor shepherds and
laborers who are hired to supply the cabinets. One pair haunted a flinty spot in Winterborne Bishop until a year or two ago. At other points a few miles away I watched other pairs during the summer of 1909, but in every instance their eggs were taken. The larger hawks and the raven, which bred in all the woods and forests of Wiltshire,
have of course been extirpated by the gamekeepers. The biggest forest in the county now affords no refuge to any hawk above the size of a kestrel. The tabernake is extensive enough, one would imagine, for condors to hide in, but it is not so.
A few years ago a buzzard made its appearance there, just a common buzzard, and the entire surrounding population went mad with excitement about it, and every man who possessed a gun flew to the forest to join in the hunt until the wretched bird, after being blazed at for two or three days, was brought down. I heard of another case at Fonthill Abbey.
Nobody could say what this wandering hawk was. It was very big, blue, above, with a white breast, barred with black, a terrible, fierce-looking bird with fierce yellow eyes. All the gamekeepers and several other men with guns were in hot pursuit of it for several days until someone fatally wounded it, but it could not be found where it was supposed
to have fallen. A fortnight later its carcass was discovered by an old shepherd who told me the story. It was not in a fit state to be preserved, but he described it to me, and I have no doubt that it was a goshawk. The raven survived longer, and the shepherd-bacom talks about its abundance when he was a boy
seventy or more years ago. His way of accounting for its numbers at that time, and its subsequent somewhat rapid disappearance, greatly interested me. We have seen his account of deer-stealing by the villagers in those brave old starvation days when Lord Rivers owned the deer and hunting-rights over a large part of Wiltshire, extending
from Cranborne Chase to Salisbury, and when even so righteous a man as Isaac Baucom was tempted by hunger to take an occasional deer, discovered out of bounds. At that time, Caleb said, a good many dogs used for hunting the deer were kept a few miles from Winterborne Bishop and were fed by the keepers in a very primitive manner. Old worn-out horses were bought and slaughtered for the dogs.
A horse would be killed and stripped of its hide somewhere away in the woods, and left for the hounds to batten on its flesh, tearing at and fighting over it like so many jackals. When only partially consumed, the carcass would become putrid, then another horse would be killed and skinned in another spot, perhaps a mile away, and the pack would start feeding afresh there.
The result of so much carrion lying about was that ravens were attracted in numbers to the place and were so numerous as to be seen in scores together. Later, when the deer-hunting sport declined in the neighborhood and dogs were no longer fed on carrion, the birds decreased year by year, and when Caleb was a boy of nine or ten their former great abundance was but a memory.
But he remembers that they were still fairly common, and he had much to say about the old belief that the ravens smell death, and when seen hovering over a flock, uttering its croak, it was a sure sign that a sheep is in a bad way and will shortly die. One of his recollections of the birds may be given here. It was one of those things seen in boyhood which had very deeply impressed him.
One fine day he was on the down with an elder brother when they heard the familiar croak and spied three birds at a distance engaged in a fight in the air. Two of the birds were in pursuit of the third and rose alternately to rush upon and strike at their victim from above. They were coming down from a considerable height and at last were directly over the
boys, not more than forty or fifty feet from the ground, and the youngsters were amazed at their fury, the loud rushing sound of their wings, as of a torrent and of their deep horse croaks and savage barking cries. Then they began to rise again, the hunted birds trying to keep above his enemies, they in their turns striving to rise higher still, so as to rush down upon him from overhead,
and in this way they towered higher and higher, their barking cries coming fainter and fainter back to earth, until the boys, not to lose sight of them, cast themselves down flat on their backs, and continuing to gaze up, saw them at last no bigger than three little black birds. Then they vanished, but the boys, still lying on their backs, kept their eyes fixed on the
same spot, and by and by first one black speck reappeared, then a second, and they soon saw that two birds were swiftly coming down to earth. They fell swiftly and silently, and finally pitched upon the down not more than a couple of hundred yards from the boys. The hunted bird had evidently succeeded in throwing them off and escaping.
Probably it was one of their own young, for the raven's habit is, when their young are fully grown, to hunt them out of the neighborhood, or when they cannot drive them off, to kill them. There is no doubt that the carrion did attract ravens in numbers to this part of Wiltshire, but it is a fact that up to that date, about 1830, the bird had many well-known old breeding
places in the county. The Rev. A. C. Smith, in his Birds of Wiltshire, names twenty-three breeding places, no fewer than nine of them, on Salisbury Plain, but at the date of the publication of his work, 1887, only three of all these nesting places were still in use—South Tidworth, Wilton Park, and Compton Park, Compton Chamberlain.
Doubtless, there were other ancient breeding places which the author had not heard of. One was at the Great Ridge Wood overlooking the Wiley Valley, where ravens bred down to about thirty-five or forty years ago. I have found many old men in the neighborhood who remember the birds, and they tell that the raven-tree was a great oak which was cut down about sixty years ago, after which the
birds built their nest in another tree not far away. A London friend of mine, who was born in the neighborhood of the Great Ridge Wood, remembers the ravens as one of the common sights of the place when he was a boy. He tells of an unlucky farmer in those parts whose sheep fell sick and died in numbers year after year, bringing him down to the brink of ruin, and how his old head-shepherd
would say solemnly shaking his head, "'Tis not strange. Master, he shot a raven." There was no ravens breeding place very near Winterborne Bishop. Caleb had never heard tell of a nesty, but he had once seen the nest of another species which is supposed never to breed in this country.
He was a small boy at the time, when one day an old shepherd of the place going out from the village saw Caleb, and calling to him, said, "'You're the boy that likes birds. If you come with me, I'll show you what no man ever seen before.' And Caleb, fired with curiosity, followed him away to a distance from home, out from the downs, into the woods, and to a place where he had never been, where there were
bracken and heath, with birch and thorn-trees scattered about. On cautiously approaching a clump of birches they saw a big thrush-like bird fly out of a large nest about ten feet from the ground, and settle on a tree close by, where it was joined by its mate. The old man pointed out that it was a felt, or field-fair, a thrush nearly as big as the
mistlethrush, but different in color, and he said that it was a bird that came to England in flocks in winter from no man knows where, far off in the north, and always went away before breeding-time. This was the only felt he had ever seen breeding in this country, and he didn't believe that no man had ever seen such a thing before.
He would not climb the tree to see the eggs, or even go very near it, for fear of disturbing the birds. This man, Caleb said, was a great one for birds. He knew them all, but seldom said anything about them. He watched and found out a good deal about them, just for his private pleasure.
The characteristic species of this part of the down-country, comprising the parish of Winterborne Bishop, are the Puit, Magpie, Turtledove, Mistlethrush, and Starling. The Puit is universal on the hills, but will inevitably be driven away from all that portion of Salisbury Plain used for military purposes. The Mistlethrush becomes common in summer after its early breeding season has ended,
when the birds in small flocks resort to the downs, where they continue until cold weather drives them away to the shelter of the wooded low country. In this neighborhood there are thickets of thorn, holly, bramble, and birch growing over hundreds of acres of down, and here the hill magpie, as it is called, has its chief breeding ground, and is so common that you can always get a sight of at least twenty birds in an
afternoon's walk. Here too is the metropolis of the Turtledove, and the low sound of its crooning is heard all day in summer, the other most common sound being that of magpies, their subdued conversational chatter and their solo singing, the chant or call which a bird will go on repeating for a hundred times.
The wonder is how the doves succeed in such a place in hatching any couple of chalk-white eggs, placed on a small platform of sticks, or of rearing any pair of young, conspicuous in their blue skins and bright yellow down. The keepers tell me they get even with these killbirds later in the year when they take to roosting in the woods a mile away in the valley.
The birds are waited for at some point where they are accustomed to slip in at dark, and one keeper told me that one evening alone, assisted by a friend, he had succeeded in shooting thirty birds. On Winterborne Bishop Down and round the village the magpies are not persecuted, probably because the gamekeepers, the professional bird-killers, have lost heart in this place.
It is a curious and rather pretty story. There is no squire, as we have seen. The farmers have the rabbits, and for game the shooting is let, or to let, by some one who claims to be lord of the manor, who lives at a distance or abroad. At all events he is not known personally to the people, and all they know about the overlord
ship is that, whereas in years gone by every villager had certain rights in the Down, to cut furs and keep a cow or pony or donkey, or half a dozen sheep or goats, now they have none. But how and why and when these rights were lost nobody knows. Naturally there is no sympathy between the villagers and the keepers sent from a distance
to protect the game, so that the shooting may be let to some other stranger. On the contrary, they religiously destroy every nest they can find, with the result that there are too few birds for any one to take the shooting, and it remains, year after year, unlet. This unsettled state of things is all to the advantage of the black-and-white bird
with the ornamental tail, and he flourishes accordingly and builds his big thorny nests in the roadside trees about the village. The one big bird on these Downs, as in so many other places in England, is the rook, and let us humbly thank the gods who owned this green earth and all the creatures which inhabit it, that they have in their goodness left us this one.
For it is something to have a rook, although he is not a great bird compared with the great ones lost, Buster and Kite and Raven and Goshawk and many others, his abundance on the cultivated Downs is rather strange when one remembers the outcry made against him in some parts on account of his injurious habits. But here it appears the sentiment in his favor is just as strong in the farmer, or in a good
many farmers, as in the great landlord. The biggest rookery I know on Salisbury Plain is at a farmhouse where the farmer owns the land himself and cultivates about nine hundred acres. One would imagine that he would keep his rooks down in these days when a boy cannot be hired to scare the birds from the crops.
One day near West Noil I came upon a vast company of rooks busily engaged on a plowed field, where everything short of placing a bird-scarer on the ground had been done to keep the birds off. A score of rooks had been shot and suspended to long sticks planted about the field, and there were three formidable-looking men of straw and rags with hats on their heads and
wooden guns under their arms. But the rooks were there all the same. I counted seven in one spot, prodding the earth close to the feet of one of the scarecrows. I went into the field to see what they were doing, and found that it was sown with vetchers just beginning to come up, and the birds were digging the seed up.
Three months later, near the same spot, on Meardown, I found these birds feasting on the corn when it had been long cut, but could not be carried on account of the wet weather. It was a large field of fifty to sixty acres, and as I walked by it the birds came flying leisurely over my head to settle with loud cawings on the stalks. It was a magnificent sight—the great blue-black bird-forms on the golden wheat, an animated
group of three or four to half a dozen on every stalk, while others walked about the ground to pick up the scattered grain, and others were flying over them, for just then the sun was shining on the field, and beyond it the sky was blue. Never had I witnessed birds so manifestly rejoicing at their good fortune with happy loud caw-caw, or rather, ha-ha, what a harvest, what abundance!
Was there ever a more perfect August and September? Rain, rain by night and in the morning, then sun and wind to dry our feathers and make us glad, but never enough to dry the corn to enable them to carry it and build it up in stacks where it would be so much harder to get at. Could anything be better?
But the commonest bird, the one which vastly outnumbers all the others I have named together, is the starling. It was Caleb Balcombe's favorite bird, and I believe it is regarded with peculiar affection by all shepherds on the Downes, on account of its constant association with sheep in the pasture.
The dog, the sheep, and the crowd of starlings—these are the lonely man's companions during his long days on the hills from April or May to November. And what a wise bird he is, and how well he knows his friends and his enemies! There is nothing more beautiful to see, Caleb would say, than the behavior of a flock of starlings when a hawk was about.
If it was a kestrel, they took little or no notice of it, but if a sparrow-hawk made its appearance, instantly the crowd of birds could be seen flying at furious speed towards the nearest flock of sheep, and down into the flock they would fall like a shower of stones and instantly disappear from sight. There they would remain on the ground, among the legs of the grazing sheep, until the hawk
had gone on his way and passed out of sight. The sparrow-hawk's victims are mostly made among the young birds that flock together in summer and live apart from the adults during the summer months after the breeding season is over. When I find a dead starling on the Downes, ranged over by sparrow-hawks, it is almost
always a young bird, a brown thrush, as it used to be called by the old naturalists. You may know that the slayer was a sparrow-hawk by the appearance of the bird, its body untouched, but the flesh picked neatly from the neck, and the head gone. That was swallowed whole after the beak had been cut off. You will find the beak lying by the side of the body.
In summertime, when birds are most abundant after the breeding season, the sparrow-hawk is a fastidious feeder.
