Bird Heart

I

THERE comes a time in the career of the most ardent bird watcher when his first enthusiasm begins to wane. The regular birds of the country have been recognized, their songs and call notes learned, their tricks of flight caught and memorized; a good many of the uncommon species have been seen, and even some of the rarities. From the point of view of what one may call the ‘collector of birds seen and recorded,’the law of diminishing returns has set in; only very seldom is he rewarded by the sight or sound of a species new or little known to him.

I had reached this stage about the end of my university career, when a lucky accident set me off on a new tack. I was spending some of the spring vacation with a reading party on the coast of North Wales. The farmhouse we were in stood all alone at the end of a peninsula; between the peninsula and the mainland was a bay, full at high tide, a glistening sweep of sand and mud at low tide. This place was the haunt of hundreds of birds — ring dotterel and sheldrake, curlew and various small waders, redshank and oyster catchers. They went on calling — even through the night, especially when there was a moon. I spent some time watching them, and soon saw the redshanks courting. It was one of the most entrancing of spectacles.

Redshanks, cock as well as hen, are sober-colored enough as you see their trim brown bodies slipping through the herbage. But during the courtship all is changed. The cock bird advances toward the hen with his graceful pointed wings raised above his back, showing their pure white undersurface. He lifts his scarlet legs alternately in a deliberate way — a sort of graceful goose step — and utters all the while a clear far-carrying trill, full of wildness, charged with desire, piercing and exciting. Sometimes as he nears the hen he begins to fan his wings a little, just lifting himself off the ground, so that he is walking on air. The hen will often suffer his approach till he is quite close, then shy away like a startled horse and begin running, upon which he folds his wings and runs after. She generally runs in circles, as if the pursuit were not wholly disagreeable to her, and so they turn and loop over the gleaming mud. Then she pauses again, and the tremulous approach is again enacted.

I did not, of course, manage to see or grasp all this at once. It had to be pieced together as the result of several spells of watching, day after day. Other things I saw too: violent encounters between rival males, which generally resolved themselves into interminable pursuits, the one seeking to chase the other away from his own domain, the other continually turning and running back; the beautiful song flights of the cock birds, when they mount with one clear, melodious note to descend with another, and so on. And I discovered that here was a whole new world of watching to be undertaken, rich in sights fascinating in themselves, and full also of meanings which had to be puzzled out and unraveled. And watching and studying the courtship of birds have been a never-failing hobby to me ever since.

As showing some of the interest behind bird courtship, I will take another sight I first saw in this Welsh bay. Oyster catchers frequented the rocky beach at the bay’s outlet; and here I used to hear them make a penetrating piping. Watching them at this, I saw that sometimes two birds and sometimes three were piping together, running round each other in short curves in an excited yet formal way, thenheads pointed down so that the justopen bill was almost touching the ground. Or on other occasions three birds would be together, but only two were piping. What did all this mean?

I had not much time to watch them then, and did not find out till over fifteen years later, when I went to Holland with a party of bird-watching friends deliberately to study the courtship habits of various wading birds. Oyster catchers were very abundant and could be easily watched; and I made up my mind to make them one of my special studies. A Dutch ornithologist who stayed a few days with us could not understand my spending so much time watching them. ‘But they are such common birds,’ he said, ‘and you can see them anywhere!’ However, I persevered, and was, in my own estimation at least, amply rewarded. I found that, apart from a special kind of flight with formal stiff wing beats, this piping appeared to be the only method which the oyster catcher possesses of expressing his or her emotions, whether of love, jealousy, or hostility. It was used when a single cock was paying court to a hen; when the hen’s emotions were well tuned up, she might use it too, so that there was a piping duet; it was used by a mated pair when another pair trespassed on to their territory, or when an unmated bird trespassed into a pair’s family circle.

Further complications arose owing to the fact that, as with many other birds, excitement is infectious. If one bird begins piping around a female in the middle of a flock, for instance, a number of others are almost certain to join in, and you may see regular ‘piping parties’ of ten or a dozen birds. These are interesting, for they are halfway to being social functions like dancing. And finally, since piping is the sole expression both for jealousy and for love, when both emotions are present, as when two rivals arc courting a single female, either emotion reenforces the expression of the other, and the piping becomes exceptionally vigorous. This is what seems to be happening when you see the trios of two birds actively piping to a third. They are two cocks courting one hen — often one of them her rightful mate, the other a rival who came to join in the fun when he saw the other begin piping. As they twist and turn, each sees first the desired hen bird, then the hated rival; and each sight stimulates to renewed piping. So the frenzied piping dance goes on; and sometimes it may arouse the female so that she too begins to pipe.

II

This curious restriction of the means of expressing emotion is another reminder of the much greater fixity of the behavior of birds as against that of human beings. An extremely entertaining result of this limitation was recorded recently by Dr. de Haan for an argus pheasant in the Amsterdam Zoo. The male argus pheasant has a long tail, but his chief adornment is a beautiful decoration along the quills of his wings. In courtship, he throws his wings up and forward, making a bell like the bell of some great flower, behind which his head and neck are completely hidden. This he directs toward the hen, while putting his head so that he can peep through the feathers and judge of the effect on her. In the species of argus pheasant to which the Amsterdam male belonged, the hen generally stands quiet for a little before the cock when he gives his display, even if she does not always show great interest.

But at Amsterdam they only had the hen of a second species of argus pheasant; and she would not stand still when the male began his courtship, but wandered erratically about the cage. The cock bird threw up his wings, peeped through — and the hen was already almost out of his field of vision. He furled his great pinions, ran round until he thought he saw another opportunity, threw himself into the flower attitude again — and was again disappointed. This went on for a few days, the cock wearing himself out in his hectic efforts, until finally lie gave up in despair, left the restless hen to her own devices, and proceeded to display before an object which, if unresponsive, was at least stable — namely, the trough in which his food was put out!

It is worth noting that in this perverse transference of his attentions he did not select just any casual object, but one which already had pleasurable associations. And indeed, this linking up of emotionally charged objects with courtship is in other birds often seen as part of their normal behavior. The most frequent of such associations is between courtship display and the handling (or rather ‘beaking’) of nest material. Male warblers posture before the female with leaves in their mouths. Herons and egrets build nests out of sticks; after they have been relieved at the end of a spell of incubation they present their mates with sticks, to the accompaniment of an elaborate display ceremony. Crested grebes build with sodden water weeds, and have a wonderful joint ceremony in which both birds of a pair dive for weeds and then, holding them in their bills, swim at each other and leap up to meet, breast against breast. Adelie penguins lay their eggs in a little depression bordered by stones, and the male, as part of his courtship, fetches stones to lay at the hen bird’s feet.

The Adelie penguin also provides an illustration of the linking on of courtship activities to objects productive of other emotions. Dr. Levick, who was camped during a whole breeding season next door to an Adelie rookery in the antarctic, records how the birds used to come up with stones and ceremoniously present them to the sledge dogs and the human members of the camp. In this case it seems that the large and unfamiliar creatures excited some feeling of wonder or interest in the breast of the birds; and they expressed it by the only means at their command.

Penguins introduce us to another interesting fact — much of their courtship is mutual, male and female simultaneously posing or displaying to one another. The display is rather ludicrous to our eyes, as it consists in pointing the beak straight up with a very sentimental, languorous expression, at the same time drooping the body, spreading the flippers, and emitting a soft humming noise. But it is a pose charged with tender emotion, as evidenced by the term used by Dr. Levick to describe it — ‘the ecstatic attitude.’ Sometimes a bird on the nest would be overcome by emotion and would go into the ecstatic attitude all by itself.

As a matter of fact, in a great many birds such mutual display is the sole or the usual method of courtship. When we consider a large number of birds, it soon becomes clear that there is a general rule: namely, that mutual courtship is usually found where both sexes share more or less equally in the reproductive duties of building the nest, sitting on the eggs, and feeding and guarding the young; whereas purely masculine display is usually found where the cock bird does not help brood the eggs, and it is at its height — as among pheasants, peacocks, rulfs, or blackcocks — where the male never comes near the nest or young at all. Apparently in (he former case the necessity for making the sexes similar in respect of their brooding and parental instincts has overflowed, so to speak, on to their other characters, and made them alike in plumage and in display as well.

A striking example of mutual courtship is seen in the albatrosses. The courtship of several species has been described, and is in each case essentially as follows: the two majestic birds stand fronting each other, spread their wings, throw back their heads, and finally end by both stretching their necks and heads vertically upward and together emitting a repeated, ringing, trumpet-like cry.

The grebes, which I have already mentioned, also have wonderful mutual ceremonies; it is an illuminating fact that though their courtship is as beautiful and as strange and fantastic as that of any gaudy tropical creature, and though they live and breed in reasonable numbers in England, even within forty miles of London, no one had taken the trouble to watch and record it thoroughly until the present century.

I have not the space to describe it here, — besides, I have set it down in print elsewhere, — but I must refer to one interesting side issue. The commonest form of courtship ceremony among grebes is for the two birds to front each other with their slender white necks raised to the full, their chestnut and black ruffs and ear tufts partially spread, and then to shake their handsome heads at each other, first rapidly, then slowly, and so on in alternation, to the accompaniment of excited little barking noises. Now where courtship is mutual, it takes two to make a display; whereas it is doubtless very enjoyable to head-shake together, it is no fun, it seems, to do so by one’s self or to an unresponsive mate. Sometimes you will see a pair dozing on the water; one bird — let us say the cock — wakes up, approaches the hen, and shakes his head ever so slightly at her, as if to say, ‘Come on, old thing.’ She, perhaps, just takes her beak from under her wing, but speedily puts it back again — too lazy to respond. He may try once or twice again, and still find her unresponsive. If now, swimming restlessly up and down, he spies another hen grebe, unmated or temporarily alone, on the water, he will swim up to her and start his headshaking advances, to which she will almost invariably respond. Here, coupled with strict monogamy during the season, we see the existence of what can only be called flirtation. The flirtation is quite innocent — it never seems to lead on to anything more serious than the excited head-shaking; but none the less, it always has the effect of waking up the rightful mate, however lethargic she may have been before.

As an example of the puzzles that beset the bird watcher, I will record an actual instance of what happened in such a case; it was in the first day or so of a fortnight which I spent watching grebes, before I had any inkling of what it was really all about. I saw a male grebe halfway between two females. He swam to one, shook his head a little, then swam to the other lifty or sixty yards off, and there followed a vigorous bout of head-shaking between them. Suddenly there was a great commotion. The female of the head-shaking couple flew off with a squawk; from below the surface there emerged another bird; and, after some splashing and rapid turning, she proceeded in her turn to indulge in a bout of head-shaking with the cock.

At the time, this was all Greek to me. It was only after another week or so of frequenting that grebe-haunted sheet of water, turning a telescope on to every happening that seemed interesting, taking copious notes, and thinking over my notes at night, that it became clear. The cock bird was flirting; the hen had woken up and dived to the attack in the way characteristic of grebes, who attempt to spear their rivals in the belly from below the surface with their sharp-pointed beak; the odd bird, thus painfully reminded that she was an interloper, flew off; and the rightful mate, instead of attacking her errant husband too, as might have been logically expected, was excited by his misdemeanor to a vigorous outburst of that head-shaking expression of affection which only a few minutes before she had refused him. It was a subtle and interesting working of the avian mind.

III

The study of courtship, indeed, would be expected to throw light on the minds of these winged and feathered creatures, so like ours in some respects, so very unlike in others — more light, perhaps, than the study of any other single aspect of their behavior. For here we have an exceedingly strong impulse at work, often without the opportunity of immediate gratification; we have rivalry, jealousy, and all the other complications of sex; we have the sexual motive interwoven with the instinct to defend the territory round the nest, and with the brooding and parental instincts; we have the mental association with nest building and nest material. It is not enough to study animal behavior by means of experiments in the laboratory. That, of course, is absolutely necessary to understand the precise way the brain machinery works in this or that particular situation; but in order to know the range of situations normally open to the bird, and the variety and richness of the behavior with which they are met — for that we must go to nature, and rely primarily upon patient watching.

Besides throwing light on psychology, the watching of bird courtship can throw light on evolution. Much of the posturing and displaying of courtship may be simply the direct outcome and expression of the intense excitement of the breeding season and of unsatisfied sexual desire. But this cannot apply to the many cases of special plumes, like the train of the peacock, which only come into use during courtship, or even, like the feather frill of the ruff or the crest of the crested grebe, are only grown in the breeding season as well as only being employed for display. These, according to our present biological knowledge, cannot have been developed and fixed in the race because of any excitement in the individuals of each generation; and they are much too elaborate and adaptive to have any merely accidental origin; they can only have been evolved because they were in some way useful, and have been developed through a slow process of selection, individuals which happened to be endowed with better adornments having an advantage over others, and accordingly bearing more progeny. It was Darwin who first reasoned this out; in the case of birds with brilliantplumaged males, he argued that their adornments must serve to secure success in winning mates, and that it was through this means that the bestadorned specimens would gain advantage, by having more chance of perpetuating their characters in their offspring. To this process he gave the name of sexual selection.

And, as a matter of fact, in one or two cases bird watching has given confirmation of Darwin’s bold and farreaching theories. The ruff, for instance, is a wading bird which in the winter is very much like half a dozen other kinds of medium-sized waders. In the spring, however, the male grows round his face the astounding frill or ruff of feathers from which the species takes its name. Not only that, but every male is a law unto himself. Some grow black ruffs, others ruffs that are white, sandy, brown, gray, pepper-andsalt, and half a dozen other shades. In addition, the tufts on the head may be of different color from the main ruff. These brilliantly adorned males assemble on what is generally called a ‘ hill ’ — a slightly raised spot of ground where they dance in exuberance of excitement or spar and duel with each other while waiting for the hens. The hens visit these masculine assembly places solely for the purpose of choosing mates. When one appears on a hill, the males flop down to the ground with ruffs fully erected and wings often outspread, and wait her pleasure as if hypnotized. She has complete freedom in choosing, and signifies her choice by tapping one of the cock birds with her bill.

Now Edmund Selous, that indefatigable watcher of birds, built himself a hide close to a ruff assembly place in Holland, and watched there almost every morning throughout the major part of the breeding season. As each ruff on a hill is differently colored from every other, the individuals can be told apart; and so by patient and prolonged watching and taking of notes Selous was able to establish the simple but vital fact that different cock birds differed very much in their success with the opposite sex. Some never succeeded in winning a single mate all through the weeks he watched. One secured more mates than all the others put together; and it was notable that this bird had a very finely developed and brilliantly colored ruff. Thus for ruffs at least the essence of the Darwinian hypothesis seems proved; and, by the way, the bird watcher was needed to give this proof, for we could never have been sure from observation or experiment on captive birds that the same processes were at work in a state of nature.

It is probable that the same influence of female choice makes itself felt in other polygamous or promiscuous species, of which the blackcock is a good example. But when we come to the common song birds, we discover that matters are much more complicated. In warblers, for instance, and buntings and finches, which Eliot Howard has watched so thoroughly, real courtship display does not begin until after the birds have paired up for the duration of the season or the brood, and so can have nothing to do with the selection of mates. And the same seems to be true for the elaborate mutual courtships of grebes, herons, and other birds. It would take too long to go into the complicated question as to where the utility and function of this kind of courtship lie; it must suffice to point out the interest and difficulty of the biological problems which intensive bird watching has raised, and which can only be solved in full by more watching.

IV

To watch birds is delightful enough in itself; but most people like a background against which they can set their observations.

These feathered creatures, what are they in the economy of Nature? What is their history, what may be their future? How do they compare with other kinds of living things?

The master key here is the idea of evolution; it unlocks the door through which alone our biological backgrounds become visible. There are no other animals built in at all the same way as birds. How did they come to evolve into their present condition?

The first thing that evolutionary study teaches us is that birds were not always so different from other creatures as they are to-day. The few fossil birds known from the upper Cretaceous age, seventy or eighty million years back, all had teeth, like any lizard. When we reach the Jurassic period, near twice as long ago, the only two specimens of birds so far found were so unlike any ordinary bird in their construction that, if it were not for the lucky accident of their having been embedded in such fine mud that the imprint of their feathers is still preserved to us, we should have been in doubt as to whether they were birds at all. They might almost equally well have been exceptionally agile reptiles, for they were toothed, had long jointed tail bones, and big claws on their fore limbs. And before this time in the world’s history, for all the hundreds of millions of years since life began, there were no birds at all.

Birds, in fact, are the offshoot from one kind of very active reptile, probably related to some of the smaller dinosaurs. They became birds through the evolution of feathers out of scales, which first, by acting as a heat-retaining blanket, allowed their temperature to be kept at a high level, well above that of their surroundings, and, secondly, made flight possible. The other peculiarities of modern birds, such as their using their high body temperature to brood their eggs, the transformation of their originally long and awkward tail, like a kite’s, into an efficient rudder fan, or the lightening of their dead weight by the substitution of horny beaks for heavy teeth — all these came later. By about forty or fifty million years ago, all birds had become of the essentially modern type; nothing has happened since then save a perfecting of the different branches — duck, or hawk, or song bird — for particular modes of life.

There have been three other groups of animals to achieve true flight: one, the flying insects, arose from a wholly different stock; two, from the same backboned stock to which the birds belong — the flying mammals or bats, and the flying reptiles or pterodactyls, the latter all long extinct.

The great advantage which the birds had over their vertebrate competitors in the art of flying was that they, possessing feathers, could make a wing of these; while the skinny flight-membranes of bats and pterodactyls had to be stretched taut and so demanded attachment to hind as well as to fore limb. Bats cannot run or hop, nor could pterodactyls; their legs arc subordinated to their wings. But birds kept their legs clear of this entanglement, as the ancestors of man kept their fore limbs clear of running; and so birds were free both of the air and of the earth, having one pair of limbs for each element.

Insects are the equals of birds in this respect; but they are inferior in another. They can never grow big. It would take too long to go into the reason why, but the fact remains; an insect as big as a swan or even as a thrush is, luckily for us, unthinkable. Small size is in itself a disadvantage; it brings the further disadvantage in its train that it prevents an animal from having a constant temperature higher than its surroundings, for its bulk is so small in proportion to its surface that the heat generated by the chemical combustion in its muscles all leaks away in no time.

So insects are not only small, but the whole tempo of their lives goes up and down with the temperature of the outer world. They cannot achieve the constancy of living possible to a bird or mammal, and are at a great disadvantage in winter, being put out of action more or less completely by the cold.

However, though birds can grow big in comparison with insects, they are limited in size in comparison with other vertebrates. This comes from the fact of flight; the laws of aerodynamics make it very inconvenient for a flying bird to weigh much over fifty pounds, and quite impossible for it to weigh as much as a horse or even a leopard. It is only the birds which have given up flying, like the ostrich or cassowary, or the extinct moa or dodo, which have even begun to grow big according to mammalian or reptilian standards.

The stock size for birds, in fact, is from something under an ounce to about ten or fifteen pounds; their construction forces them to play their rôle in the world within these limits of weight.

V

The next valuable light which evolution throws on birds is that they do not in any way represent a past stage in man’s evolutionary development, but have developed divergently along their own fines. Birds and mammals, in fact, represent two quite distinct branches of the tree of life, which developed quite independently from reptiles. And they developed from two quite distinct reptilian stocks, so that if we want to find a common ancestor for furry mammal and feathery bird, we must look for it in the most primitive kinds of reptiles, and must go back at least to the very beginning of the middle ages of life, about two hundred million years back. Their special resemblances, such as the uniform and high temperature, have been independently evolved in the two stocks, and in some cases, as with the division of the heart into two quite separate sides for more efficiency in circulation, though the result is the same, the evolutionary method followed has been dissimilar.

Birds have kept reptilian-looking scales on their feet, and have stuck to the reptile’s method of reproduction by large-yolked eggs contained in a protective shell. In some ways, however, the bird branch has evolved beyond their rivals, the mammals, and in these respects must be regarded as at the very tiptop of the tree of life. Birds have the highest temperature, and therefore the greatest speed of vital chemistry, of any creatures. They have the greatest activity, the greatest emotional variety; they show the highest extremes of beauty in color and pattern, they have the most striking and highly developed courtship of any group of animals, and their songs are by far the most beautiful and elaborate music that the world knew before the coming of man. They are the most mobile of creatures, and so are at a great advantage over every other kind of land animal in high altitudes; for they can breed there and take advantage of the riches of the arctic lands and still more of the arctic seas during the summer, and then migrate to temperate climates, leaving a few wretched foxes and reindeer to eke out existence over the inhospitable winter.

There are two lines in which mammals have beaten the world — in brain development and efficient methods of reproduction. As regards reproduction, it seems clear that the fact of flight discouraged any adoption of the perfected mammalian method of nourishing the unborn young within the mother’s body. Extra weight is a severe handicap to a bird; and when it can mature and lay its eggs one at a time, and yet hatch them out all at once by putting off incubation until all are laid, it would be a disadvantage to handicap itself by the weight of half a dozen embryos at once. And it is perhaps just because of the birds’ very success in the matter of flight and of high temperature that they failed to progress further in regard to brains. So many avenues were thrown open to them through their mobility and their activity that no pressure lay on them to circumvent fate by means of intelligence.

Possibly, too, their relatively small size had some say in the matter. Intelligence depends on making new combinations of nerve paths in the higher centres of the brain; and for this a much larger number of nerve cells and fibres seem to be required than for even the most elaborate equipment of the fixed nerve routes by which instincts operate.

One thing at least is certain and significant: whereas, in the general stock of mammals, progress was being made and new specialized lines budded out up till a mere five or ten million years ago, and in the line of man’s descent evolutionary advance has continued up to the present and may well be prolonged into the future, the birds settled down to stability about halfway through the Tertiary epoch, about twenty or thirty millions of years back, and since then, though they have doubtless sprouted out innumerable tiny side twigs of new species and genera, do not seem to have made any real evolutionary progress.

Nor are they in the least likely to achieve any in the future. Like the insects, whose most advanced types, such as the ants, have been living the same kind of lives, endowed with the same kind of structure, for an even longer space of time, they appear to have reached the limit of perfection attainable, in the circumstances prevailing upon the earth, by the kind of creature which they are. They have attained the limiting speed of flight possible to living flying machines operating with feathers and one pair of wings; their temperature is as high as it can profitably be made; their migrations take them to the extreme end of habitability in high latitudes; their ability in nest building is as great as could be attained by instinct alone.

We must remember, however, that evolution is never all progress. Progress, it seems, there has always been, but it is progress in the upper limit of life’s achievements, not in the great bulk of her productions. Indeed the impulsion to progress comes from the very fact that there already exists this great mass of animals and plants which have already reached a more or less final and stable relation with the world about them, and have already adequately filled the lower and more obvious places in life’s economy. It is just because there exists such competition in the old ways of life that it is an advantage for any creature to push forward and adopt new and improved methods.

Each group that has reached stability is thus filling a very definite place in the elaborate system of exchanges which constitutes the balance of Nature. Looked at from this point of view, as regards what they do rather than how they do it, birds take on a new interest. The great majority of them are eaters of other animals, either throughout life or, in the case of small grain-eating birds like various finches, throughout their greedy nestling period. For this they have stuck to the ancestral predilections of vertebrates, which were all in origin flesh eaters; a herbivorous diet only came in late in vertebrate evolution, with some of the big reptiles, and later and still more efficiently with some of the bigger mammals. Among birds, on the other hand, very few are herbivorous; such are some of the geese and ducks.

The birds as a whole thus stuck to a meat diet; but their average size determined the average size of their prey. The great majority of them are so moderate in bulk that they can only eat small creatures; and these small creatures, though they will include worms and snails and spiders, will by the nature of the biological world be for the most part insects. Some of the larger birds eat creatures up to the scale of frogs and mice, or are carrion feeders, or prey on other, smaller birds; and there are of course numerous water birds which live on Crustacea, the aquatic equivalent of insects, on molluscs, and on fish. But if we could take statistics of the food of all birds, in especial of all land birds, we should find that insects headed the list.

Now insects, in contradistinction to vertebrates, are in the great majority vegetable feeders, both by ancestral predilection and by modern practice. So that in regard to what we may call biological trade — the complicated circulation of matter through lifeless forms in earth, water, and air, through green plants, animal bodies, and microscopic scavengers like moulds and bacteria, and back into lifeless forms again — the net effect of birds is to be a check upon insects in their consumption of green plants and their products. In t his way they are obviously the allies of man: remove every bird in the world at one stroke; the biological balance would be tilted, and it would be much harder even than now to protect man’s crops and trees from the ravages of their persistent insect consumers. Birds, in fact, are one of the few groups of animals whose activities as a whole are useful to man.

VI

But do not let us run away with the idea that economics is everything. There was a letter in the Times one day apropos of Sir Plilton Young’s bill for safeguarding some of the beauties of the countryside. The writer, after pointing out that the bill, if it became law, would involve in certain cases some financial sacrifice for individuals or for the country, continued, ‘And after all, the aims of the measure are merely aesthetic’ — and therefore, in his estimation, not to be weighed against even small quantities of pounds, shillings, and pence.

It is just this point of view — the attitude embodied in that word ‘merely’ — which I want to combat. Economics is the foundation of everything, and money is money and must be made. We may know that elementary truth well enough and yet be permitted the reminder that the really important thing is what we are going to ask of our money when we have made it. And one thing that some will want to ask for is the refreshment of unspoilt country and the delight of wild birds.

The bird watcher and the bird lover ask for more birds, and more different kinds of them, and more opportunities of quietly watching and studying them. In the last thirty or forty years there has been a welcome change in the attitude of the general public about birds. They are more interested in them, fonder of them, delight to see photographs and read accounts of them in their wild state, but deprecate the killing of them or the wanton taking of their eggs much more than they used to. The bird watcher can help the growth of this changed attitude. We have gone a long way, but could go much further. In some American towns there are now bird boxes everywhere, in city parks and private gardens, and bird tables and bird baths — and naturally an enormous increase in the number of birds to gladden the eyes of city dwellers. In Germany before the war I went once casually into the city park at Wurzburg, and found an astounding plenty of birds, and people feeding them. One man had a couple of tits on his hand, chaffinches and blackbirds at his feet; he told me he once had a spotted woodpecker swoop down from a tree and take a nut from his fingers. And the hawfinches, those fantastic huge-billed birds, so shy that many country people do not know of their existence even where they arc not uncommon — they were sitting about in the trees like sparrows; I even saw a pair of them courting over a public path and in full view and sound of the trams and traffic in the street beyond.

We could encourage and tame birds like this in our own garden and our cities and our parks if we wanted to.

The bird lover can help to see that the Bird Protection laws are enforced. He can try to get the law changed; to take an example, the law which permits the discharge of waste oil from oildriven ships at sea, to drift about and foul our shores and in doing so to smear itself on the plumage of hundreds of guillemots and divers and puffins and other sea birds, prevent them from opening their wings, and so condemn them to death from starvation.

And he can help by supporting the societies which are saving wild bits of country from being built over or otherwise developed; or reserving them as actual sanctuaries, inviolate to the birds; or providing bird rests at lighthouses to prevent dazzled migrants from being drowned; or paying watchers to see that protected birds are not shot or robbed of their eggs.

For — and this is my last word — in considering the birds’ place in Nature we must remember that they have a place in civilization as well as in wild nature, and that even if we be busy mechanizing so many aspects of life, or rather, just because we are mechanizing them, there is all the more reason to reserve to birds — shy birds as well as tame, rare birds as well as common — a place in our civilized scheme of things, and to sec that that place is kept for them, and so for our delectation and that of our posterity.