it was within a stone’s throw of the sea at lamorna, that i sat and listened to ned’s “tale of the birds.”

we had been fishing the trout-stream that empties itself into the cove, and were resting on the boulders near the bridge before turning homewards. ned is a good all-round sportsman, but his knowledge of birds is remarkable, and the reason is not far to seek. his father was a taxidermist who was regarded as an authority on british birds by rodd and by gould. for some twenty years ned assisted him in his work; but his delight was, and is, to wander over the country in search of sport and specimens. to this is, perhaps, chiefly due the knowledge he possesses of the avifauna of cornwall.

to understand the birds of cornwall, said he, you must know that, besides those always with us, and the migrants that reach us regularly in the spring and autumn, many kinds of wild-fowl visit us in hard winters and remain whilst the frost lasts. this corner of england, owing chiefly to the warm sea about it, is milder than any other except the scilly isles, and when birds are frozen out elsewhere, they can pick up a living here. a good feeding-ground is the land’s end district—what with its beaches, its boggy ground and pools on the moors, and above all the overgrown, marshy valleys, which mostly run north and south, and are sheltered from the bitter east winds. birds of gay plumage have been shot in these bottoms which you would expect to meet with only in a tropical forest—such as the hoopoe, the waxwing, the roller, the bee-eater, and the golden oriole. of the four hundred birds comprised in the avifauna of the british isles two hundred and ninety have been observed in cornwall, so you see that our bird-life is as rich as the fish-life in the sea about the promontory, or the flora that makes the face of the country so beautiful.

now it’s out of the question my attempting to talk about nearly three hundred different kinds of birds, so i’ll pick out a few things that may interest you. look! that’s a starling on the cottage chimney, and i’ll begin with him. a few years ago you might search west cornwall over without seeing one—i mean in the month of august, though they came in tens of thousands in the winter. i’ve seen the osier beds along the eastern green and the reeds at marazion marsh black with them; and when i was a boy i used to fire at passing flocks with a bow and arrow, as with a great whirr of wings they skimmed over the well field on their way to roost. i believe that starlings have regular lines of flight, as they seldom failed to pass over that field about sundown. to come to the point, no sooner was winter over than they all went up-along; but now some remain all the year round, and breed. the cause is to be found, i believe, in the enormous increase of this bird.

then the daws—i mean the jackdaws—are ever so much more numerous than they used to be. in my young days they were scarce, and i used to be let down over the cliffs with a rope round me, to get their eggs. now you can see them everywhere, about the old mine-ruins, about the farmhouses, and even about the villages.

the green woodpecker is also more plentiful than it used to be. considering how bare of trees the country is, this is perhaps more surprising than the increase of the starling or the daw. it is true that some new plantations, such as those at tregavara and bijowans, are growing up, and who can say but that in time we shall have jays and nightingales, and perhaps squirrels?

the country-people say that the “tinner,” that is the “dishwasher” or water-wagtail, is scarcer than it was before the blizzard, which must have caused the death of tens of thousands of birds. they call it the tinner, because it builds its nest in the mouth of the old mine-shafts.

now i’ll tell you about the last cornish choughs i ever saw alive. it was away on the rinsey cliffs, a lone place between pra sands and porthleven; and of course i wanted to get them. i had a gun with me—as indeed i always had, for there was no close season in those days. the birds were on a splat of fine turf near the edge of the cliff, and within gunshot of an old engine-house that lay beyond them. there was no chance of my getting near enough to these birds—shy as hawks through persecution—not even by crawling; for the surface was nearly as smooth as a bowling-green, with only a patch of vernal squill here and there. lying in a dip of the ground, and all hidden up to my eyes, i could see every movement of the two birds—a cock and a hen they were—and more, i could hear every note they uttered. “daw, daw,” they kept calling, a kind of bleat, a pitiful little cry i should call it; and yet i wanted to kill them both. instead of getting closer to me, as i hoped, they were, if anything, moving nearer to the engine-house. then, thinks i, why not get round and come at them from behind the building. this i set out to do, making a long circuit, and at last the ruin lay between me and them. i reached it without having seen the birds fly away, though i could no longer hear them calling. all of a tremble with excitement, and with the gun at full cock, i crept through a hole in the wall, made my way round the edge of the shaft, and peeped through a chink in the wall opposite. no choughs could i see. they were gone; and i was disappointed, sir, i can tell ee. i went to the edge of the cliff, and looked down. not a bird was to be seen; nothing but a few shags on the rocks in the white water. as i said, i never saw a chough alive again. they were, i believe, the last of their race. it’s a pity they’re extinct. handsome birds i call them, with their black glossy plumage and vermilion bill and legs. i can hear that “daw, daw” now as i sit here; plaintive it was for a love-note.

i forgot to say that the magpie is more common than it used to be, though the farm boys “strub” every nest they can find. interesting birds i call them, and a feature of the country, a homely feature, like the pigeons i saw about the abbey up in london, only wilder.

yes, a magpie on a wind-clipt thorn bush, a yellow-hammer on a furze spray, gulls behind a ploughshare, a cormorant on a rock in the green water, and jackdaws about a broken mine-stack, are pictures downright cornish; and they are always with us.

dear me, how everything comes back when you begin to talk.

if anything would make me laugh again, it would be what i once saw at nancothan. i was looking through a window of the farmhouse into the orchard. perhaps it was the peculiar behaviour of a magpie that attracted my attention. there he was with his neck drawn out and head thrown back, making tremendous thrusts with his beak at something on the ground. after lunging two or three times, he turned his head on one side and looked at whatever lay there, first with one eye, then turning his head, with the other. it’s a comical sight is a magpie looking with one eye at anything. well then, he began to dig, dig again, and after a final critical examination with each eye, flew up into an apple-tree. i ran out to see what he had been pecking at so vigorously. what do you think i found? why, a china nest-egg! i see that it amuses you, sir, as it used to amuse me. it’s the funniest thing in bird-life i ever saw.

the home of the cormorant.

there’s more tragedy than comedy however about bird-life. many young birds are stolen from the nests, to say nothing of finches, warblers, linnets, and chats killed by hawks. of course, all this is part of the plan of nature, though to my thinking there’s a deal of cruelty in it. what crueller thing can you imagine than a falcon cutting down a hern winging home, say to trevethoe park, where they breed, with food for its young? i never saw this; but one day, when lying up in bosigran cliffs watching for seals, i saw a fight between a peregrine and a raven, in which the raven got the worst of it. the falcon wanted the whole cliff to itself, and in the end he had his way, for the ravens forsook their nest.

a bird with a royal mien is a peregrine falcon, an ornament to the wild cliffs where he breeds. i have seen him soar till he looked like a speck in the blue, but i have never seen him stoop.

now and again i’ve had glimpses of what is most beautiful in our bird-life—say of a kingfisher flying low over pools left by the ebb, when the sun catches its breast and back feathers; or what i once saw, and only once, a hern in full breeding plumage standing still as a statue in the shallows of a sparkling pool. i remember how lovely he looked. it was on the moor above lanyon quoit, when the early furze was in bloom; and both the hern and myself were after the trout.

for gulls, you won’t find a better place than newlyn harbour. i have shot the great black-back there, and the little gull, a bird no bigger than a turtle-dove; and from the pier-head i shot a “bonaparte” gull, a bird that breeds in the great salt lakes of america. you may ask if it came from there. i do not know, but i believe it did. governor augustus smith of scilly once brought my father an esquimaux curlew. where did that little stranger come from, what frozen seas lit by “northern lights” had he flown over?

i say, there are wonderful things in bird-life, especially in their migratory movements. take the red-breasted flycatcher that once reached here from the far east, or the snow-bunting whose home is within the arctic circle, and probably at the pole itself. but no, you will realise better if i take a bird you are familiar with. consider the willow-wren or the golden-crest. one would say that either of them is incapable of long flights. yet these little creatures, whose weight you can hardly feel in your hand, cross hundreds of miles of sea without putting their foot down, except, it may be, on a passing ship’s rigging. it’s not only the distance covered that’s so astonishing; what guides them in their long journey under the stars? man navigates the ocean with the help of a compass, but how do the myriads of migrating birds find their way? i’ve puzzled my head many times to solve the problem, but i admit i’m beaten; unless they possess a sense of direction such as cats and dogs undoubtedly have, and which even the savage in the pathless forest is said to have developed.

the 8th of may and the 11th of october or thereabouts are the times of arrival in west cornwall, and many’s the time i’ve watched the sun rise over mount’s bay on those days. what pictures i’ve seen there! the east afire, the west aglow with rosy light, beyond the belt of furrowy sand the blushing sea, and on the edge of it the little strangers wading and feeding. the dates of their departure are just as definite; and as the time for leaving our shores draws near, the birds gather at certain rendezvous and display great uneasiness. i have heard my father say, “the warblers will be off soon, ned.” he used to feed the birds in our aviary over the porch as regular as clockwork every morning, and he would notice how restless they were, even throwing themselves against the bars of the cage whilst instinct stirred them.

i don’t believe any man ever understood birds better than my father; he was that observant, and could imitate their cries so exactly, all but talk with them, in fact. mr gould, when he visited cornwall, always came to see him, and used to hang on his words, so to speak; and that was no mean compliment. but there, sir, you’ll think me prejudiced.

talking of my father brings to mind an incident i will tell you. my father was very fond of wandering about morvah and zennor, when he could spare the time. you know what a lot of waste land there is in those parishes. scattered over the downs there are some lonely pools frequented by birds, and in one of them i shot the only phalarope i ever saw alive. well, my father was stealthily approaching rather a big pool when, to his annoyance, he saw a boy driving away some cattle that had been drinking there. luckily he did not pass it by, for there on the bank, away from where the bullocks had been drinking, was a little bird that until then had never been observed in england. it was a buff-breasted sandpiper, and i could tell by his face when he returned home that he had shot something very rare. whilst i was examining the bird by the lamp-light, my father took up the western morning news; and when i asked him where i should put the bird for the night, he made no answer. tired as i knew he was, i thought this strange, because he was such a genial man. the bad news he had seen in the paper had upset him; that was it. the french had lost a great battle, i think it was called sedan. my father was very fond of the french. after colenso, and in the same week too with magersfontein and stromberg, i thought of this incident, and i understood what my father had felt. around our fires the men were so quiet that the camp might have been asleep. it would seem that such times are for thinking, not for question and answer. forgive me, sir, for getting so down in the dumps.

my happiest days after birds were spent on the eastern green and around marazion marsh. i have always been fond of small wading birds, such as sanderlings, dunlins, stint, and turnstones. shy and wild they are, and elegant they look, running about on the edge of the tide, following the ebb or advancing before the flow. days and days i’ve watched them and returned home without firing a shot, but i’ve killed yellow-shank, dotterel, kentish plover, and pygmy curlew there; and once i found, after a heavy gale, a stormy petrel washed up on the beach.

and now, perhaps i have said enough for you to understand why this little tongue of land, whose tip is the land’s end, has got such a hold upon me. on the greyest day the moors are not dismal to me, nor the shores melancholy. there’s hardly a square mile out of the hundred that isn’t full of associations. the cliffs, the wastes of furze and heather, the tangled bottoms, the open beaches and the little coves, are all rich in pleasant memories; and the whistle of the curlew, the croak of raven or hern, the scream of sea-fowl, the piping of small wading birds and the song of the sedge-warbler are to me the music of familiar voices. rolling veldt, mountain range and river don’t appeal to me like the downs, hills, and streams that i’ve got to know by heart.

the land’s end.

“a treeless, barren waste” a man once called the land’s end district to my poor father, who preferred the scent of its furze to the perfume of roses and the bell-heather before hothouse flowers. everything wild he liked, ay, loved; the sea-pinks, the golden samphire, the sea-holly, the ferns in the zawns, the seaweed in the pools, the shells on the beach. and when he was unable to move out of the house—he lived to eighty-two—he used to sit up in the little bay-window, where he could see the sun set, and watch for my return, and then he’d ask what birds i’d seen, and about the flowers. the speedwell, the scarlet pimpernel, and the forget-me-not were especial favourites of his, and i’d always bring home one or the other in my fishing-basket. touching it was to see him look at them.

if ever a man loved nature with his whole soul, my father did, but above everything he loved the birds.

but come! we must be moving. i see the gulls are winging home.