A Year with the Birds

Nec tamen haec cum sint hominumque boumque labores
Versando terram experti, nihil improbus anser
Strymoniaeque grues et amaris intuba fibris
Officiunt aut umbra nocet.[58 - But no whit the moreFor all expedients tried and travail borneBy man and beast in turning oft the soil,Do greedy goose and Strymon-haunting cranesAnd succory’s bitter fibres not molestOr shade not injure —]

And in line 307 of the same book he tells the husbandman that the winter is the time to catch them: —

Tum gruibus pedicas, et retia ponere cervis
Auritosque sequi lepores;[59 - Time it is to setSnares for the crane, and meshes for the stag,And hunt the long-eared hares.]

a passage from which it might appear as if the Crane were snared as an article of food, not only as an enemy to the agriculturist. And indeed in Pliny’s time the epicure’s taste was all in favour of cranes against storks; but when Virgil wrote, the reverse was the case. This little fact, so characteristic of the sway of fashion over the gourmand of that luxurious age, was recorded by Cornelius Nepos, and is quoted from him by Pliny (Nat. Hist. x. 60).

The Crane is now a bird of passage in Italy, and the Stork also; they appear in spring on their way to northern breeding-places, and in autumn reappear with their numbers reinforced by the young broods of the year. These habits seem to have been the same in Virgil’s day. In the passage just quoted (Georgic i. 120) it is evidently in the spring that the bird was hurtful to the crops, as the seed was to be sown in the spring (line 43, etc.).

On the other hand, in line 307, the Crane is to be snared in the winter; yet I can hardly believe that any number could have stayed in Italy during winter, if the climate was then colder than it is now. Moreover, Pliny speaks of the Crane as ‘aestatis advena,’ that is, a summer visitor, as opposed to the Stork, who was a winter visitor. But these Latin words ‘aestas’ and ‘hiems’ are to be understood loosely for the whole warm season, and the whole cold or stormy season; and if cranes came on their passage northwards, when warm weather began, they must also have appeared, on their return journey, when cold weather was beginning; so that both crane and stork might equally be styled ‘aestatis advena,’ or ‘hiemis advena.’ Pliny was surely making one of his many blunders when he distinguished the two birds by these two expressions.

The migration of such great birds as these, unlike those of our tiny visitors to England, could hardly escape the notice even of men who knew nothing of scientific observation. Virgil has given us a momentary glimpse of the Crane’s migration in spring; he is following in the tracks of Homer, but as a Mantuan he must have seen the phenomenon himself also.

Clamorem ad sidera tollunt
Dardanidae e muris; spes addita suscitat iras;
Tela manu jaciunt; quales sub nubibus atris
Strymoniae dant signa grues, atque aethera tranant
Cum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo.[60 - The Dardanians on the walls raise a shout to the sky.Hope comes to kindle wrath; they hurl their missiles strongly;even as under black clouds cranes from the Strymon uttertheir signal notes and sail clamouring across the sky, andnoisily stream down the gale.– Aen. x. 262 foll.]

Here, as they fly before a southern wind, they are on their way to the north in the spring. But in another passage he seems rather to be thinking of autumn; it is where he is telling the husbandman how to presage an approaching storm, such a storm as descends in autumn from the Alps upon the plains of Lombardy: —

Nunquam imprudentibus imber
Obfuit; aut illum surgentem vallibus imis
Aeriae fugere grues, aut bucula coelum
Suspiciens patulis captavit naribus auras,
Aut arguta lacus circumvolitavit hirundo.[61 - Never at unawares did showers annoy:Or, as it rises, the high-soaring cranesFlee to the hills before it, or, with faceUpturned to heaven, the heifer snuffs the galeThrough gaping nostrils, or about the meresShrill-twittering flits the swallow.– Georgic i. 373.]

The general tenor of the whole passage of which these lines are a fragment, as well as their original in the Diosemeia of Aratus, points to the approach of ‘hiems,’ the stormy season, as the event indicated; the falling leaves dance in air, the feathers of the moulting birds float on the water, but the swallow is not yet gone. The deep Alpine valleys seethe with swirling mist, which rises into gathering cloud, and soon becomes stormy rain beating upon the plains, as we may see it in any ‘Loamshire’ of our own, that lies below the stony hills of a wilder and wetter country-side. In this striking and truthful passage, Virgil has not followed his model too closely, but was evidently thinking of what he must often have witnessed himself.

The Stork is only mentioned by Virgil in a single passage —

Cum vere rubenti
Candida venit avis longis invisa colubris.[62 - In blushing springComes the white bird long-bodied snakes abhor.– Georg. ii. 320.]

Doubtless the bird arrived in great numbers in spring on the Mantuan marshes, and found abundance of food there in the way of frogs and snakes. Its snake-eating propensity was considered so valuable in Thessaly, that the bird was preserved there by law, says Aristotle.[63 - Mirabilia 23.] But did it remain to breed in Italy? It is remarkable that both Aristotle and Pliny have very little to say of its habits, and hardly anything as to its breeding; and if the Stork had been a bird familiar to them, they could hardly have failed to give it a prominent place in their books. At the present time it seems to pass over Italy and Greece on its passage northwards, never staying to breed in the former country and rarely in the latter; yet this can hardly be owing to temperature, as it breeds freely in the parallel latitudes of Spain and Asia Minor.

As regards ancient Italy, however, the question seems to be set at rest by a very curious passage from the Satyricon of Petronius, which has been kindly pointed out to me by Mr. Robinson Ellis. It is remarkable not only for its Latin, but for its concise and admirable description of the characteristic ways of the Stork: —

Ciconia etiam grata, peregrina, hospita,
Pietaticultrix, gracilipes, crotalistria,
Avis exsul hiemis, titulus tepidi temporis,
Nequitiae nidum in cacabo fecit meo.[64 - See Petronius, Satyr. 55. Cp. also Juv. Sat. 1, line 116, and Mayor’s note. In the London Zoological Gardens, in March 1889, a pair of Storks were illustrating Petronius’ lines admirably – except in that they were captives.]

“A Stork too, that welcome guest from foreign lands, that devotee of filial duty, with its long thin legs and rattling bill, the bird that is banished by the winter and announces the coming of the warm season, has made his accursed nest in my boiler.” I am reminded also of a story, which has the authority both of Jornandes and Procopius, that at the siege of Aquileia in A.D. 452, Attila was encouraged to persist by the sight of a Stork and her young leaving the beleaguered city. “Such a domestic bird would never have abandoned her ancient seats unless those towers had been devoted to impending ruin and solitude.”[65 - Gibbon, vol. iv. p. 240, ed. Milman.] Here then we seem to have another example of a bird abandoning its ancient practice of breeding, occasionally at least, in Italy. If this is due to persecution, the persecutors have made a great mistake. The Stork does no harm to man, but rather rids his fields of vermin; the Crane, which belongs to a different order of birds, may do serious damage, as we have seen, to cultivated land, like the ‘improbus anser,’ and other birds which Virgil in the first Georgic instructs the husbandman to catch with lime or net, or to frighten away from the fields.[66 - Georg. i. 120, 139, 156, 271.]

Let us now turn to the big black birds of the race of the Crows, which are always so difficult to distinguish from one another: for the Roman savant not less difficult than for our own unlearned. There are to be found in Italy at the present day the Raven, the Crow, the Rook, the Jackdaw, the Chough, and the Alpine Chough; all of these seem to be fairly common and resident in one or other part of the country, except our familiar friends the Crow and the Rook, the former of which is very rare, and the latter hardly more than a bird of passage. We cannot of course expect to find these accurately distinguished by the ancient Italians; and there is in fact still some uncertainty as to the identification of certain birds of this kind mentioned by Virgil.

The two commonest of these are the corvus and the cornix– words which undoubtedly represent two different species. The Roman augurs, who were always busily engaged in observing birds (and it were to be wished that they had observed them to some better purpose), clearly distinguished corvus and cornix.[67 - Cic. de Div. i. 29.] So also did Pliny,[68 - N. II. x. 32.] in the following curious passage: “The corvus lays its eggs before midsummer, and is then in bad condition for sixty days, up to the ripening of the figs in autumn: but the cornix begins to be disordered after that time.” Virgil also uses the words for two distinct species; his cornix is solitary —

Tum cornix plena pluviam vocat
Et sola in sicca secum spatiatur arena;[69 - Then the crowWith full voice, good-for-nought, inviting rain,Stalks on the dry sand mateless and alone.– Georg. i. 388.]

improba voce while corvus is gregarious, as is shown in the following memorable description of Nature and of the birds taking heart after the storm has passed: —

Tum liquidas corvi presso ter gutture voces
Aut quater ingeminant, et saepe cubilibus altis,
Nescio qua praeter solitum dulcedine laeti,
Inter se in foliis strepitant; juvat imbribus actis,
Progeniem parvam dulcesque revisere natos.[70 - Soft then the voice of rooks from indrawn throatThrice, four times, o’er repeated, and full oftOn their high cradles, by some hidden joyGladdened beyond their wont, in bustling throngsAmong the leaves they riot; so sweet it isWhen showers are spent, their own loved nests againAnd tender brood to visit.– Georg. i. 410.]

That in these last beautiful lines corvus means a Rook, no Englishman is likely to deny; yet there are two difficulties to be put aside before we can make the assertion with entire confidence. The first is, that Virgil, here following Aratus, translated by corvus the Greek word κόραξ, which is not generally accepted as meaning a Rook. This is the word which the Greek historian Polybius uses for those naval machines invented by the Romans, in the first war with Carthage, for grappling with a hooked projecting beak the galleys of the enemy; and the rook’s bill is hardly so well suited to give a name to such an engine as that of the crow or raven,[71 - Sundevall (Thierarten des Aristoteles, p. 123) pronounces κόραξ to have been our Raven.] which has the tip of the upper mandible sharply bent downwards, like that of most flesh-eating birds. Still I must hold it probable that Aratus here used the word for the rook, as he makes it gregarious, and so, I think, did the Alexandrian scholar Theon, who wrote a commentary on his poem. The only other possibility is that he was thinking of the Alpine Chough, a bird which he might possibly have known, and one of thoroughly social habits. But that Virgil, though he too probably knew this bird, was not thinking of it when he wrote the lines just quoted, I feel tolerably sure; he would most likely have used the word graculus rather than corvus, which would seem never to have been applied, like monedula and graculus, to the smaller birds of the group, such as the Alpine Chough and the Jackdaw.

The second difficulty lies in the fact that the Rook is now only a bird of passage in Italy, never stopping to breed in the southern part of the peninsula, and very rarely in the northern; while Virgil speaks of the corvi in the last-quoted passage as loving to revisit their nests. But this difficulty has been overcome by the delightful discovery that the Rooks still stay and breed in the sub-alpine neighbourhood where Virgil passed his early life.[72 - See Newton’s Yarrell, ii. 290.] As I have remarked about the pigeons and the stork, the climate may have been such as would induce some birds to stop south of the great Alpine barrier, which now find there no climate cool enough for breeding; and the Rook was perhaps a more regular resident and breeder then than he is now.

We may conclude then that Virgil’s corvus is our old friend the Rook, even if some Latin authors use the word equally for Rook, Crow, and Raven. Pliny for example tells us (N. H. x. 124) that the corvus can be taught to speak (fancy a bird talking Latin, that stiff and solemn speech!), that he eats flesh for the most part, and that he sometimes makes his nest in elevated buildings; feats which we are not used to associate with Rooks. In fact it is plain that Pliny, who was more of a learned book-reader than a careful observer of the minutiæ of nature, was not quite clear in his notions about the big black birds. But if we can be pretty sure about corvus, what is Virgil’s cornix, stalking on the shore in solitary state, and uttering admonitory croaks from the hollow holm-oak? If we consult dictionaries we shall learn that cornix is the Crow or Rook, “a smaller bird than corvus.” Where did the dictionaries get this authority for making confusion worse confounded? If Virgil distinguished corvus and cornix, and if corvus is the rook, then cornix must be the crow or the raven, and in fact the word probably stands for both. I should incline on the whole to the raven, seeing that at the present day it is much the commoner bird of the two in Italy. Alpine choughs and jackdaws are not wont to stalk about alone; and though the larger chough (our Cornish chough) might do so, and is to be found in the mountain districts of Italy, he cannot well be the bird generally understood by cornix. Could a chough learn to talk with his long thin red bill? But Pliny knew of a talking cornix; “while I was engaged upon this book,” he says, “there was in Rome a cornix from the south-west of Spain, belonging to a Roman knight, which was of an amazingly pure black, and could say certain strings of words, to which it frequently added new ones.”

Swans are frequently mentioned by Virgil, as by other Latin and Greek poets. This splendid bird must have been much commoner then throughout Europe than it is now, and accordingly attracted much attention. It doubtless abounded in the swampy localities of the north of Italy, and at the mouths of the great rivers of Thrace and Asia Minor, as well as in the north of Europe, where it came to be woven into many a Teutonic fable. Homer has frequent and beautiful allusions to it; and the town of Clazomenae, at the mouth of the river Hermus, has a swan stamped upon its coins.

This Swan of the old poets is without any doubt the whooper (Cycnus musicus), whose voice and presence are still well known in Italy and Greece. Virgil had seen it at Mantua, on the watery plain of the Mincius:

Pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos.[73 - Whose weedy water feeds the snow-white swan.– Georg. ii. 199.]

And in an admirable simile in the eleventh book of the Aeneid, he likens the stir and dissension in the camp of Turnus, when the news suddenly arrives that Aeneas is marching upon them, to the loud calls of this bird:

Hic undique clamor
Dissensu vario magnus se tollit ad auras:
Haud secus atque alto in luco cum forte catervae
Consedere avium, piscosove amne Padusae
Dant sonitum rauci per stagna loquacia cycni.[74 - With that a great noise rises aloft in diverse contention, even as when flocks of birds haply settle on a lofty grove, and swans utter their hoarse cry among the vocal pools in the fish-filled river of Padusa.– Aen. xi. 456; cp. vii. 700.]

We now come to two birds mentioned in the same line of the third Georgic. The poet is telling the farmer to water his flocks in the cool evening of a hot day:

Cum frigidus aera vesper
Temperat, et saltus reficit jam roscida luna,
Litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi.[75 - When cool eveAllays the air, and dewy moonbeams slakeThe forest glades, with halcyon’s voice the shoreAnd every thicket with the goldfinch rings.– Georg. iii. 338.]

The first of these birds is also mentioned in a line of the first Georgic, which is mainly taken from Aratus; but it is significant that Aratus does not mention the ‘alcyon’ either here or anywhere else.

Non tepidum ad solem pennas in littore pandunt
Dilectae Thetidi alcyones.[76 - Not to the Sun’s warmth there upon the shoreDo halcyons dear to Thetis ope their wings.– Georg. i. 398.]

That the ‘alcyon’ of these two passages is to be identified with our Kingfisher, which is still an Italian bird, and the only one of its kind, I can have no reasonable doubt; for Pliny’s description of the bird is too exact to be mistaken. “It is,” he says, “a little larger than a sparrow, of a blue-green colour (colore cyaneo), red in the under parts, having some white feathers close to its neck, and a long thin bill.” This description, it is true, is copied almost word for word from Aristotle, the only exception being the allusion to the white feathers on the side of the neck, which are a well-known feature in the Kingfisher.[77 - This exception is singular, as Pliny seems to depend on Aristotle for everything else which he tells about the bird. I am inclined to think that in this case Pliny must have supplemented his master’s account from his own observation. He had a villa on the bay of Naples, which bay was probably the ‘littus’ referred to by Virgil; and both may here have seen the bird on the shore.] Whether both were thinking of the same bird it is impossible to decide; but that Pliny was describing our Kingfisher, and believed Aristotle to have done so in the passage he copied, it is almost unreasonable to doubt.

It is, however, an open question whether the bird ordinarily known to the Greeks as ἀλκυὼν is to be identified with the Kingfisher. The greatest living authority on the birds of the Levant, Canon Tristram of Durham, tells me that he has convinced himself that it is not the Kingfisher, but the Tern or Sea-swallow: a rare coin of Eretria led him to this conclusion, on which a Tern is figured, sitting on the back of a cow.[78 - I have seen a photograph of this coin, and satisfied myself that the bird was meant for a Tern. But I have so far been unable to discover any connection between Eretria and the ἀλκυὼν. Sundevall is confident that Aristotle’s bird is the Kingfisher.] And it must be allowed that the Greeks seem to have thought of their ἀλκυὼν as a sea bird no less than as a river bird. Aristotle remarks that it goes up rivers, but he seems to have thought of it mainly as a sea bird, and a well-known passage in the seventh Idyll of Theocritus appears to bear him out. But I am not here specially concerned with Greek ornithology, and what Virgil says of the alcyon piping and pluming himself on the shore is perfectly consistent with the habits of the bird. I have myself seen it on the coast of Dorset, “pennas in littore pandens,” and taking flight over a bay full half a mile in width. A greater difficulty lies in the alleged vocal powers of the bird; they sing, Pliny tells us, in the reeds, and Virgil’s alcyon makes the shore echo with his voice. The Kingfisher, so far as I know, is a silent bird except when disturbed; he will then utter a shrill pipe as he flies away. But I am quite at a loss to explain his singing, except by supposing that this was one of several curious delusions that had gathered round a curious bird.[79 - E.g. Aristotle gives, and Pliny copies from him, an extraordinary account of the nest and eggs. N. H. ix. 14. See Note C (#pgepubid00008), at end of volume.]