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Mateship with Birds
By A. H. Chisholm Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Copyright © 1922 Alec Chisholm
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-922072-24-5
CHAPTER 1
THE GIFTS OF AUGUST
i like to think that O. Henry was not altogether facetious in laying it down that the true harbinger of Spring is the heart. "It's just a kind of feeling," he confides. ... "It belongs to the world." At any rate, one may nod sagely to these observations without necessarily subscribing to a further suggestion, that the three kinds of people who feel the approach of Spring first are poets, lovers, and poor widows — which is another question, one quite beyond me.
It is clear enough, however, that the manner of advent, as distinct from the appeal, of the sweet season is not the same in varying latitudes. Spring returns to Southern Australia, for instance, with grace rather than might. There is not the Swinburnian clamor — the "noise of winds and many rivers" — which marks the breaking of Winter's sway in the old world, and, on the other hand, the semi-languid nature of the Spring of Northern Australia is pleasantly lacking. But in the southlands of this great Commonwealth at least there is good red-blooded vitality, almost sufficient of inspiring throb to make the approach of Persephone perceptible to the dullard.
'Twas Jack o' Winter hailed it first,
But now more timid angels sing:
For what dull ear can fail to hear
Afar the fluting of the Spring?
All the Winter through Jacky of that ilk, the Brown Flycatcher, has been disporting himself, like Lowell's Blue-Bird, "from post to post along the cheerless fence," or chanting his "Jacky-Jacky-Jacky, Sweeter-sweeter-sweeter!" in the big dry tree by the roadside. Now his penetrating pipe has left the philosophic key and risen close to the ecstatic, striking a responsive chord in the breasts of those gems of the grass, the communistic Red Robins, White-fronted Bush-Chats, and Yellow-tailed Tit-Warblers.
All the Winter through, too, the merry-making Honey-Birds have been playing and chortling about the blossoming eucalypts. Is it merely fancy that on these crisp, bright mornings of early August their notes have taken a higher range, or are they, in truth, sensitive of the fact that nesting-time is near? Possibly it is because the Honey-Birds live "closer" to the sun that they, rather than other birds of the Winter, are quick to detect the approach of the nearing Spring. But the insectivorous birds of the ground have noted a quickening of the pulse of the earth, reflected in the steady increase of insect-life, and, perhaps, the opening of the cheerful-looking flowers of the sundew and "early Nancy." And none is more apt to spread the glad tidings than the Brown Flycatcher. The fact that Jack o' Winter is much more quietly garbed than the other small species matters least of all to him; he is just as companionable as any of them, and a good deal more assertive.
I remember being much entertained in a far-off August by the antics of one of these little brown sprites, which insisted in dancing attendance on a distant relative, a Restless Flycatcher to wit. Jacky's motives may have been purely disinterested, but it seemed to me he cherished a shrewd idea that the curious rasping notes or whirring wings of the "Scissors-Grinder" would disturb sufficient insects for them both. Some element of the same suspicion evidently possessed the black-and-white bird. He showed no appreciation whatever of his relative's company, and once or twice he snapped viciously at the uninvited guest who sat so fraternally near. But little amenities of that kind left the philosophic Jacky quite unruffled. A veritable Elisha in point of determination, he was flitting serenely along after his ungracious companion when I lost sight of both.
A curiously distant bird altogether is the Restless Flycatcher. Unlike its double, the familiar Willy-Wagtail, it suggests but little, if any, of the human quality one subconsciously looks for in the voice of a bird, and it is not easy to get on "speaking" terms with either the spanking male or buff-tinged female. Only once have I succeeded in calling a "Scissors-Grinder" into conclave, and then it was purely curiosity at the gathering of other birds that persuaded the lady to stay awhile. On one other occasion, however, a male bird unwittingly gave me a close audience at its "wheezing" performance, and I saw how the strange notes worked up from the body of the bird until, at their height, the small bill was wide open, as with a brooding bird gasping in the heat of the Summer sun. It is not true, as several books assert, that the grinding notes which have made the Restless Flycatcher famous are only uttered when the bird is hovering a few feet above the ground. I hear them just as often when their author is perched on stump or fence-post. Essentially, however, this beautiful Flycatcher has the sea-birds' manner of hunting; it is able to look down in flight without turning the head to one side.
Soon, now, the beauteous Robins will be unobtrusively moving off to the uplands for the breeding-season; the Flycatchers, too, will be seeking out their old nesting-trees, and the more open areas will be left to the busy Magpies, the shapely Bush-Chats, and the merry Tit-Warblers. What more sparkling bird-melody than the voices of the Yellow-tailed Tit-Warblers giving greeting to our Lady of the Spring! You hear them now in almost every timbered field and along the skirts of any road or highway bounded with hedge-accommodation — happy bursts of melody akin to the softly joyous laughter of young girls.
It is as yet too early for the migratory and travelled birds generally to reappear. If the Winter be unusually mild, it is possible that an enterprising Lark or Warbler will be heard some weeks in advance of the main body of those birds; but the only migrants regularly presented by August to the maiden Spring in Central Victoria are the Cuckoos. So soon as the impalpable heralds of the coming season begin to throb in the frosty air, the bird-lover finds himself straining an attuned ear for the call of the Pallid Cuckoo. He has not long to wait. Be it wet or fine, the airy voice of this Ishmael of the bird-world will certainly be heard before the month is out, and its cumbersome form — "floppy," a critical girl has called it — with its attendant bevy of resentful smaller species, will be seen bunched upon fence, telegraph line, or any other point of vantage in the sunlit woods.
I can find nought of intrinsic melody in this Cuckoo-voice, or, indeed, in the call of any of its close relatives. But the leisurely, throaty strain, if it has not the blitheness that poets have found in the wandering voice of the famous bird of the old world, has a persuasive quality of its own at this time o' year, something that speaks — without, shall we say? attempting to do so — of pulsing life in sun-warmed fields. The Winter of 1909 was exceptionally wet in Victoria, but not sufficiently so to repress this herald of the Spring. On the twelfth day of August there rang out, clear and high above a factory which endured my services, the invitation of a Pallid Cuckoo. No shades of a prison-house closed about one growing boy that afternoon; he was out along a bush railroad superintending a disagreement between a philosophic grey Cuckoo and a host of excited Honeyeaters!
The smaller Bronze Cuckoo I have found to be less definite in its time of arrival, my earliest record for Central Victoria being the eighth of July. On that date in the forebodingly dry 1914, as I read Burroughs on Cuckoos in a sun-streaked bush recess, the ventriloquial wail of one of the little birds sounded hard by — a pretty coincidence. The shrill nature of this whistle is calculated to give its author a hearing in any bush orchestra. It is quite simple and easy of imitation. With a fluency developed in many attempts to win the confidence of other birds, I once addressed a solitary Bronze Cuckoo which, freshly arrived in the district, was placidly banqueting on caterpillars at the top of a sapling. Cherchez la femme! Apparently having other Spring ambitions besides the pursuit of insects, the pretty bird spread wide his tail and drooped swiftly towards the source of the invitation. But a Yellow-tufted Honeyeater had charge of the world below, and the avine Lochinvar was forced to flee from a rebuke thoroughly righteous in its vigor. A second whistle brought a repetition of the comedy. I let the matter rest at that; it would hardly have been fair to test the Cuckoo's valor (and gullibility) any further.
Incidentally, one must admit that the sex of the bird was only assumed; and, on the same principle of fairness, it should be added that there was another August day whereon a similar whistle, which much resembles the pipe of the pretty Crested Shrike-Tit, moved a female of that species to follow the call excitedly for a good half-mile!
In many instances the voice of a bird is a key to its nature. At all events, the call is nearly always an indication of the spirit of the bird, and in harmony with its flight. Thus, the Pallid Cuckoo flies as deliberately as it calls, and the Swift Lorikeet (to take just one instance) calls as boisterously as it flies. I see this strange honey-eating Parrot, with the aloof, gipsy-like ways, quite a lot in the early Spring, and hear it most on those grey days which may precede either rain or sunshine. Then, when "all the air a solemn stillness holds," and the earth seems to be listening tensely for the fluting of the Spring, a company of the dapper green birds with the red under-wings will suddenly start from a blossoming eucalypt, and go rushing pell-mell through or above the tree-tops, breaking the spell with their ringing, metallic "Clink-clink-clank-clink."
With customary sense of the eternal fitness of things in this way, we boys knew this bird as the "Clink," just as we distinguished its little relative with the red face by the title of "Gizzie." To the aboriginals this latter bird (Glossopsitta pusilla) was the "Jerryang"; but who that has heard a company of the 'Keets calling "Giss-giss!" as they hurry through the upper air, will not agree that the white boys' name is at least as fitting?
It is not to be assumed, of course, that one must of necessity go bushwards on these days to enjoy the smile of her Grace whom Hugh McCrae has prettily termed "milkmaid August." The almond trees are flowering in the towns now, and birds and bees are revelling among the snowy blossoms. The planting of trees in any situation brings its own particular aesthetic and economic reward; but there is little to excel the pleasure to be derived, at this period, from the proximity of a big almond tree to the home. Towards the end of July, when "blossom by blossom the Spring begins," the keen eye of a roving Lorikeet notes the invitation of the opening buds; and very soon then — for news of this nature travels quickly in Birdland — every branch has its bird. An almond tree in full bloom is a pageant in itself, excelling in pure radiance the magnificently assertive jacaranda and flame-tree of Queensland. And when its bird-guests are present the very air breaks into flower. There are the black-white-and-yellow of the madcap New Holland Honeyeater, and the delicate greens and whites of the "Chickowee" and Silvereye, with the distinctive colors of the Scarlet-faced and Purple-crowned Lorikeets making for a vivid impression of the Tennysonian fancy of blossom in purple and red.
I see only these two of the Lorikeets in the almond trees — the small, swift-flying "Gizzie," and, more plentifully, the aptly named Purple-crowned Lorikeet, a slightly larger bird than its congener, but hardly imposing enough to warrant the tremendous "state" name of Glossopsitta porphyrocephala. Happily, however, the busy little 'Keet sees not itself as scientists see it, and there is nothing but joyousness in all its movements, whether it be performing acrobatic feats in the almond tree or shouting along through the upper air.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that there is none of this clamor when the birds are in a tree close to a house. The Silvereyes may lilt away to their hearts' content, and the bees may drone unceasingly, but the little purple-crowned birds remain discreetly quiet. It may be, of course, that they are too busy with the blossoms, but, having listened to their gaily irresponsible chatter when out of sight of human habitation, or in trees that do not show up green-coated birds, I prefer to give the Lories credit for possessing an attribute which many members of a certain higher(?) genus conspicuously lack — that is, perception of the proper time to be silent!
Some years ago — to be precise, it was on the first day of August, 1913 — a small company of Lorikeets was feeding in a favorite almond tree, when a lone Butcher-Bird on evil bent dropped softly down alongside one of them. If the little fellow was expected to flutter away in alarm, anticipation was not justified. He simply uttered a reproachful cry and hopped to one side. What bluff was this! The grey marauder looked amazed, and made as though to follow, whereupon the small bird turned and screeched decisively at him. Then the Butcher-Bird hopped to a higher branch, apparently with the intention of dropping on to the plucky 'Keet. But the latter's surprising sang froid was too disconcerting. Presently the whole band of Lorikeets flew off unharmed, and a crestfallen Butcher-Bird sulked in a mulberry-tree.
I wonder, by the way, if this altogether attractive little Lorikeet is only of recent birth; that is to say, was it created after the advent of Bass Strait? For the fact is that the Purple-crown is the only one of the five honey-eating Parrots known to Victoria which does not penetrate to Tasmania. But then, why should the Northern States also be excluded from its itinerary? — the additionally interesting fact being that, despite its fraternity with relatives, it is the only Lorikeet unknown outside the southern portions of the mainland.
It is one thing to compare the blossom of the almond tree with other cultivated blooms, and quite a different matter to compare it with Australia's lilies of the field, the flowers of the bush. In the heart of every lover of nature these have a place apart. It may be that they do not coincide with what W. H. Hudson has called the "largeness" of the Spring mood as definitely as do, say, the gipsy voices of the Cuckoos; but, being of the earth without "earthiness," as we usually accept the term, they express the spirit of the waking bushland as not even the birds can. Without straining at a fancy, one may say the bush-flowers are the smile of the earth, which smile persuades the air to laughter, expressed in the songs of mating birds. Nina Murdoch, the New South Wales girl-singer, knows them both. In verse as delicate as Brereton's (earlier quoted) is dancing, she offers us a Perdita-gift of "orchids, green, and mauve, and white," and then tells of the bringer of this dainty posy:
Oh! it is August, singing by the creek,
And flitting to and fro upon the heath,
With busy fingers and bewitching ways
Of darting here and there at hide and seek
To please her babe, the Spring, who underneath
A leafy shelter with a wild flower plays.
It is to these little terrestrial orchids, chiefly members of the genus Glossodia, that the thoughts of lovers of Southern bush-flowers must go back in after years — go back with all the affection of a Briton for the primrose by the river's brink. Their rank, wildwood fragrance is potent to revive old memories, no less than their peculiarly human-like, sympathetic little "eyes." I think particularly in this connection of the blue (or mauve) Glossodia major, probably the most plentiful of the small ground orchids of Southern Australia.
You are my own, of my own folk, you little blue flower
of the Spring.
Is there, one wonders, something especially human which endears us to wild flowers of a blue color? Mr. Hudson (most widely read of British contemporary nature-writers) replies in the affirmative.
"The blue flower," he says, "is associated, consciously or not, with the human blue eye; and, as the floral blue is in all or nearly all instances pure and beautiful, it is like the most beautiful human eye. This association, and not the color itself, strikes me as the true cause of the superior attraction which the blue flower has for most of us."
If this theory were applied to the orchid alone it would be rendered additionally strong by consideration of the eye-like construction of the flower. Looking at blue flowers by and large, however, it seems to me that their attraction for us has little of the directly human appeal of blue eyes, but rests in the peaceful purity of the color and its affinity with fair weather. Accepting Mr. Hudson's suggestion, we would have to find commensurate beauty in flowers, or even leaves, of a warm brown — for who can deny the charm of brown eyes? — but we do not do so. The little blue and white orchid, then, as a widespread harbinger of blue and white days, may be ranked among the typical wild flowers of the Southern Spring.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mateship with Birds by A. H. Chisholm. Copyright © 1922 Alec Chisholm. Excerpted by permission of Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
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