Bird Watching. Edmund Selous
of beauties. He does it often, but not always in quite the same way; it is a varying perfection, for each time it is perfect, and sometimes it seems to vie with almost any aerial master-stroke. The bird's wings, as it shoots aloft, are spread half open, and remain thus without being moved at all. The body is turned sideways—sometimes more, sometimes less—and the light glancing on the pure soft white of the under part, makes it look like the crest of foam on an invisible and swiftly-moving wave. As the uprush attains its zenith, there is a lovely, soft, effortless curling over of the body, and the foam sinks again with the wave. Such motions are not flight, they are passive abandonings and givings-up-to, driftings on unseen currents, bird-swirls and feathered eddies in the thin ocean of the air. It is, I think, the cessation of all effort on the bird's part which makes the great loveliness here. The impetus has been gained in flight before—acres of moorland away sometimes—it "cometh from afar." The upward fall, the delicious, crested curl and soft, sinking swoon to the earth are all rest—rhythmical, swift-moving rest.
Another curious and extremely pretty performance—a familiar bar of that thread of melody, that "main theme" of the "movement"—is when two birds, one just a little behind the other, and at slightly different elevations, both make the same movements, in quick succession, the bird behind mimicking the one in front of him in a kind of aerial follow-my-leadership. Does the one pause and hang on extended wings that rapidly beat the air, the other does so too. Does it sail on a little, and then make a sideway dive, it is imitated in the same way, and thus, often for quite a little while, the two will understudy each other—for each, I think, may alternately become the leader. Again—if this is not merely a development of the above—two of them will hover on outstretched wings directly over and almost touching each other. Sometimes, indeed, they do touch, for the bird that is stretched above is continually trying to strike down on the other one with his wings, and often succeeds by making a sudden little drop on to him—a drop which is only of an inch or so—quite covering him up for a moment. Then, disjoining, they will flap along for some while, still close together, flashing out alternately dark and silver, as if showing their glints to each other, till in two "dying falls" they sweep apart, and skim the ground and double-loop the heavens.
When peewits seem thus to battle together with their wings, in the air, it may well be that they are really fighting, in which case we may perhaps assume that they are two males, and not male and female. But as what I shall have to say with regard to the stock-dove on this point may be applied to the peewit, and as I have better evidence in the case of the former bird, I will not dwell on it longer here.
But the question arises whether in many other cases, when the sporting birds would seem to be male and female, this is really the case. One is apt to think so at first, but when one sees, often, a third bird associate itself with a pair who are thus behaving, and join for a little in their antics, or when one of a pair desisting and alighting on the ground, the other continues to sport in precisely the same way with another bird, or when, again, the supposed lovers become two of a small flock or band, and all sport thus together, crossing and intermingling till they again separate: one must suppose that these evolutions, though they may be mostly of a nuptial character, are not sexual in the strictest sense of the term, but that the social element enters more or less largely into them. But amongst savages there are, I believe (if not, let us imagine that there are), dances, the theme of which is marriage, where sometimes men, sometimes women, sometimes men and women, dance together, all having in their mind the primitive ideas suggested by that great institution, men thinking of women, women of men, under every kind of grouping. One may suppose it to be thus with the peewits, as they sport with one another in the air during the nuptial season, in which case the social and sexual elements would be a changing and varying factor. One may say, indeed, that there can be no sexual sport or play into which the social element does not also, and necessarily, enter. This is, no doubt, true, strictly speaking, but the latter may be so merged in the former that practically it does not exist.
Some of the peewits' nuptial and non-aerial bizarreries are of this nature, but as they are peculiar, and seem to stand in some relation to another great class of avian activities, I shall reserve them for a future chapter.
CHAPTER III
Watching Stock-doves, Wood-pigeons, Snipe, etc.
I have alluded to the aerial combats of the stock-dove during the nuptial season as elucidating similar movements on the part of the peewit, though I was not able so fully to satisfy myself as to the meaning of these in the latter bird. The fighting of birds on the wing has sometimes—to my eye, at least—a very soft and delicate appearance, which does not so much resemble fighting as sport and dalliance between the sexes. Larks, for instance, have what seem, at the worst, to be delicate little mock-combats in the air, carried on in a way which suggests this. Sometimes, rising together, they keep approaching and retiring from each other with the light, swinging motion of a shuttlecock just before it turns over to descend, and this resemblance is increased by their flying perpendicularly, or almost so, with their heads up and tails down. Indeed, they seem more to be thrown through the air than to fly. Then, in one fall, they sink together into the grass. Or they will keep mounting above and above each other to some height, and then descend in something the same way, but more sweepingly (for let no one hope to see exactly how they do it), seeming to make with their bodies the soft links of a feathered chain—or as though their own "linked sweetness" of song had been translated into matter and motion. In each case they make all the time, as convenient, little kissipecks, rather than pecks, at each other.
Again, in the case of the redshank, though I have little doubt now that the following, which was both aquatic and aerial, was a genuine combat between two males, yet often at the time, and especially in its preface and conclusion, it seemed as though the birds were of opposite sexes, and, if fighting at all, only amorously.
"Two birds are pursuing each other on the bank of the river. The water is low, and a little point of mud and shingle projects into the stream. Up and down this, from the herbage to the water's edge and back again, the birds run, one close behind the other, and each uttering a funny little piping cry—'tu-tu-oo, tu-oo, tu-oo, tu-oo.' It is one, as far as I can see, that always pursues the other, who, after a time, flies to the opposite bank. The pursuer follows, and the chase is now carried on by a series of little flights from bank to bank, sometimes straight across, sometimes slanting a little up or down the stream, whilst sometimes there is a little flight backwards and forwards along the bank in the intervals of crossing. This continues for something like an hour, but at last the pursuing bird, as both fly out from the bank, makes a little dart, and, overtaking the other one, both flutter down into the stream. They rise from it straight up into the air like two blackbirds fighting, then fall back into it again, and now there is a violent struggle in the water. Whilst it lasts the birds are swimming, just as two ducks would be under similar circumstances, and every now and then, in the pauses of exhaustion, both rest, floating on the water. The combat would be as purely aquatic as with coots or moor-hens, if it were not that the two birds often struggle out of the water and rise together into the air, where they continue the struggle, each one rising alternately above the other and trying to push it down—it would seem with the legs. These were the tactics adopted in the water too, but yet, with a good deal of motion and exertion, there seems but little of fury. The birds are not acharné, or, at least, they do not seem to be. It is a soft sort of combat, and now it has ended in the combatants making their mutual toilette quite close to one another. One stands on the shore and preens itself, the other sits just off it on the water and bathes in it like a duck."
Even here, owing principally to the friendly toilette-scene, I was not quite clear as to the nature of the bird's actions. How completely I at first mistook it in the case of the stock-dove with