Bird Watching. Edmund Selous
progeny to themselves, the former may take thought and escape. The nightjar, partridge, and, especially, the wild-duck, are good instances of this, and in every case where I have come upon them under the requisite conditions they have never failed to show me their shrewd estimate of man's nature. With all these three birds, however, it has always been the presence of the young that has moved them to act in this manner, their conduct during incubation being quite different. The instance which I am now going to bring forward with regard to the snipe has this peculiarity, if it be one, that the bird was hatching her eggs at the time and was still engaged in doing so a few days afterwards, proving that the young were not just on the point of coming out on the occasion when she was first disturbed. As I noted all down the instant after its occurrence, the reader may rely upon having here just exactly what this snipe did.
"This morning a snipe flew out of some long reedy grass within a few feet of me, and almost instantly taking the ground again—but now on the smooth, green meadow—spun round over it, now here, now there, its long bill lying along the ground as though it were the pivot on which it turned, and uttering loud cries all the while. Having done this for a minute or so, it lay, or rather crouched, quite still on the ground, its head and beak lying along it, its neck outstretched, its legs bent under it, with the body rising gradually, till the posterior part, with the tail, which it kept fanned out, was right in the air. And in this strange position it kept uttering a long, low, hoarse note, which, together with its whole demeanour, seemed to betoken great distress. It remained thus for some minutes before flying away, during which time I stood still, watching it closely, and when it was gone, soon found the nest, with four eggs in it, in the grass-tuft from which it had flown. Its action whilst spinning over the ground was very like that of the nightjar when put up from her young ones." It is to be noted here that this snipe flew a very little way from the nest, and when on the ground did not travel over it to any extent, but only in a small circle just at first, after which it kept in one place. The Arctic skua (Richardson's skua, as some call it, but I hate such appropriative titles—as though a species could be any man's property!) behaves in the same kind of way, for, lying along on its breast, with its wings spread out and beating the ground, it utters plaintive little pitiful cries, keeping always in the same, or nearly the same, spot. This has, of course, the effect of drawing one's attention to the bird, and away from the eggs or young (whether it acts thus in regard to both I am not quite sure, but believe that it does), but the effect produced on one—though here, of course, as throughout, I only speak for myself—is that the bird is in great mental distress—prostrated as it were—rather than acting with any conscious "intent to deceive." The same is the case with the nightjar, whose sudden spinning about over the ground in a manner much more resembling a maimed bluebottle or cockchafer than a bird, seems to proceed from some violent nervous shock or mental disturbance. The same, too, though in a lesser degree, may be said of the partridge, and in all cases it is obvious that the bird is very much excited and ausser sich.
Darwin, if I remember rightly,[8] found it difficult to believe that birds, when they thus distract our attention from their young to themselves, do so with a full consciousness of what they are doing and why they are doing it. When the female wild-duck, however, acts in this manner, it is difficult, I think, to escape from this conclusion. She flaps for a long way over the surface of the water, pausing every now and again and waiting, as though to see the effect of her ruse, and continuing her tactics as soon as you get up to her. Having thus led you a long distance away, she rises, and leaving the river, flies in an extended circle, which will ultimately bring her back to it by the other bank when you are well out of the way. The chicks, meanwhile, have (of course) scuttled in amongst the reeds and rushes, though they often take some little while to conceal themselves. She acts thus on a river or broad stretch of water, which enables her to keep you in sight for some time. But it is obvious that if you come upon her with her family in a very narrow and sharply winding stream, the first bend of it will hide you from her, and she would then, assuming that she is acting intelligently, have all the agony of mind of not knowing whether her plan was succeeding or not. It was in such a situation that I met her only last spring, and to my surprise—and indeed, admiration—instead of flapping along the water as I have always known her to do before in such a contre-temps, she instantly flew out on to the opposite bank, and began to flap and struggle along the flat marshy meadow-land, of course in full view. I crossed the stream and pursued her, allowing her to "fool me to the top of my bent," and this she appeared to me to do, or to think she was doing, on much the same kind of indicia as one would go by in the case of a man. Now, unless this bird had wished to keep me in view, and thus judge of the effect of her stratagem, or unless she feared that "out of sight" would be "out of mind" with regard to herself (but this would be to credit her with yet greater powers of reflection), why should she have left the water, the element in which she usually and most naturally performs these actions, to modify them on the land? Yet to suppose that it has ever occurred suddenly, and as a new idea, to any bird to act a pious fraud of this kind, would be to suppose wonders, and also to be unevolutionary (almost as serious a matter nowadays as to be un-English).
[8] But I have not been able to find the passage, so may be mistaken.
But may we not think that an act, which in its origin has been of a nervous and, as it were, pathological character, has become, in time, blended with intelligence, and that natural selection has not only picked out those birds who best performed a mechanical action—which, though it sprung merely from mental disturbance, was yet of a beneficial nature—but also those whose intelligence began after a time to enable them to see whereto such action tended, and thus consciously to guide and improve it? There is evidence, I believe—though neither space nor the nature of this slight work will allow me to go into it—that such abnormal mental states as of old inspired "the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell," and to-day influence priests or medicine-men amongst savages (to go no farther), can be, and are, combined with ordinary shrewd intelligence; nor does it seem too much to suppose that a bird that was always seeing the effect of what it did when it, as it were, fell into hysterics, should have come in time to reckon upon the hysterics, to know what they were good for, and even to some extent to direct them—as a great actor in an emotional scene must govern himself in the main, though, probably, a great deal of the gesture, action, and facial expression is unconsciously and spontaneously performed.
Now, if we assume that these ruses employed by birds for the protection of their young—as in the case of the wild-duck—have commenced in purely involuntary movements, without any proposed object, the instance here given of the snipe may perhaps throw some light upon their origin. A bird, whilst incubating, and thus, hour after hour, doing violence to its active and energetic disposition, is under the influence of a strong force in opposition to and overcoming the forces which usually govern it. Its mental state may be supposed to be a highly-wrought and tense one, and it therefore does not seem surprising that some sudden surprise and startle at such a time, by rousing a force opposite to that under the control of which it then is, and producing thereby a violent conflict, should throw it off its mental balance and so produce something in the nature of hysteria or convulsions. But let this once take place with anything like frequency in the case of any bird, and natural selection will begin to act. As the eggs of a bird are stationary, and do not run away or seek shelter whilst the parent bird is thus behaving in their neighbourhood, it would, on the whole, be better for it to sit close or to fly away in an ordinary and non-betraying manner. Allowing this, then, as the eggs of a bird would be less exposed to danger the less often the sitting bird went off them in this way, might not natural selection keep throwing the impulse to do so farther and farther backwards till after the incubatory process was completed? Then the tendency would be encouraged—at least in the case of birds whose young can early get about—for, as a rule, such antics would shield them better than sitting still. The young would generally be in several places—giving as many chances of discovery—and, on account of the suddenness of the surprise, would often be running or otherwise exposing themselves. Take, for instance, the case of the wild-duck, where I have always found the brood a most conspicuous object at first, and taking some time, even on reedy rivers, to get into concealment.
And I can see no reason why an aiding intelligence