But The
Herring-Gull Has A Shriller, More Piercing Voice, And
Resembles The Black-Backed Species Just As, In Human Voices, A
Boy's Clear Treble Resembles A Baritone.
Both birds have a
variety of notes; and both, when the nest is threatened with
danger, utter one powerful importunate cry, which is repeated
incessantly until the danger is over.
And as the birds breed
in communities, often very populous, and all clamour together,
the effect of so many powerful and unisonant voices is very
grand; but it differs in the two species, owing to the quality
of their voices being different; the storm of sound produced
by the black-backs is deep and solemn, while that of the
herring-gulls has a ringing sharpness almost metallic.
It is probable that in the case I am describing the effect of
sharpness and resonance was heightened by the position of the
birds, perched motionless, scattered about on the face of the
perpendicular wall of rock, all with their beaks turned in
my direction, raining their cries upon me. It was not a
monotonous storm of cries, but rose and fell; for after two or
three minutes the excitement would abate somewhat and the
cries grow fewer and fewer; then the infection would spread
again, bird after bird joining the outcry; and after a while
there would be another lull, and so on, wave following wave of
sound. I could have spent hours, and the hours would have
seemed like minutes, listening to that strange chorus of
ringing chiming cries, so novel was its effect, and unlike
that of any other tempest of sound produced by birds which
I had ever heard. When by way of a parting caress and
benediction (given and received) I dipped my hands in
Branscombe's clear streamlet it was with a feeling of tender
regret that was almost a pain. For who does not make a little
inward moan, an Eve's Lamentation, an unworded, "Must I leave
thee, Paradise?" on quitting any such sweet restful spot,
however brief his stay in it may have been? But when I had
climbed to the summit of the great down on the east side of
the valley and looked on the wide land and wider sea flashed
with the early sunlight I rejoiced full of glory at my
freedom. For invariably when the peculiar character and charm
of a place steals over and takes possession of me I begin to
fear it, knowing from long experience that it will be a
painful wrench to get away and that get away sooner or later I
must. Now I was free once more, a wanderer with no ties, no
business to transact in any town, no worries to make me
miserable like others, nothing to gain and nothing to lose.
Pausing on the summit to consider which way I should go,
inland, towards Axminister, or along the coast by Beer, Seton,
Axmouth, and so on to Lyme Regis, I turned to have a last look
and say a last good-bye to Branscombe and could hardly help
waving my hand to it.
Why, I asked myself, am I not a poet, or verse-maker, so as to
say my farewell in numbers? My answer was, Because I am too
much occupied in seeing. There is no room and time for
'tranquillity,' since I want to go on to see something else.
As Blake has it: "Natural objects always did and do, weaken,
deaden and obliterate imagination in me."
We know however that they didn't quite quench it in him.
Chapter Nneteen: Abbotsbury
Abbotsbury is an old unspoilt village, not on but near the
sea, divided from it by half a mile of meadowland where all
sorts of meadow and water plants flourish, and where there are
extensive reed and osier beds, the roosting-place in autumn
and winter of innumerable starlings. I am always delighted to
come on one of these places where starlings congregate, to
watch them coming in at day's decline and listen to their
marvellous hubbub, and finally to see their aerial evolutions
when they rise and break up in great bodies and play at clouds
in the sky. When the people of the place, the squire and
keepers and others who have an interest in the reeds and
osiers, fall to abusing them on account of the damage they do,
I put my fingers in my ears. But at Abbotsbury I did not do
so, but listened with keen pleasure to the curses they vented
and the story they told. This was that when the owner of
Abbotsbury came down for the October shooting and found the
starlings more numerous than ever, he put himself into a fine
passion and reproached his keepers and other servants for not
having got rid of the birds as he had desired them to do.
Some of them ventured to say that it was easier said than
done, whereupon the great man swore that he would do it
himself without assistance from any one, and getting out a big
duck-gun he proceeded to load it with the smallest shot and
went down to the reed bed and concealed hiniself among the
bushes at a suitable distance. The birds were pouring in, and
when it was growing dark and they had settled down for the
night he fired his big piece into the thick of the crowd, and
by and by when the birds after wheeling about for a minute or
two settled down again in the same place he fired again. Then
he went home, and early next morning men and boys went into
the reeds and gathered a bushel or so of dead starlings. But
the birds returned in their thousands that evening, and his
heart being still hot against them he went out a second time
to slaughter them wholesale with his big gun. Then when he
had blazed into the crowd once more, and the dead and wounded
fell like rain into the water below, the revulsion came and he
was mad with himself for having done such a thing, and on his
return to the house, or palace, he angrily told his people to
"let the starlings alone" for the future - never to molest them
again!
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