64 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



the cathedral tower in their evening gambols, and the 

 daws sitting and making love on the shoulders of the 

 saints on the majestic west front, while the young 

 clamoured from somewhere at their backs. So home 

 at dusk from all the wildness and freedom of bird-life 

 about me, to view this scene of domestic bliss, no more 

 inappropriate to the massive dignity of the pile than to 

 my own mood of rest and shelter. 



The ducks on the moat were on the borderland 

 between wild and tame, and their actions after pairing 

 were consequently of great interest. They face one 

 another, and rising upon their tails from the water 

 wave their wings in vigorous exultation before settling 

 down again. In performing this rite of consummation — 

 for a ceremony it unquestionably is — their wing-beats 

 keep exact time and measure, and each bird sinks down 

 upon the water at the same moment as the other. Now 

 just as evolution has elaborated the colours of birds 

 and set them in harmonious contrast and gradation 

 against one another, so the movements of birds during 

 the nuptial season tend to become more and more 

 patterned and ritualistic — conventionalized in fact — ^just 

 as a poem is a conventionalized arrangement of feet 

 and rhymes, a machinery to extract the full honey 

 from the raw material of language. In the raw material 

 of time, when birds were maladroit in the air and dull 

 in plumage, their loves were no doubt a mere scramble 

 of desire, unattended by order and beauty. That these 

 rhythmic designs of movement should survive the 

 degeneracy of semi-domestication is not only an evidence 

 of their tenacity, but of nature's artistic purposes upon 

 her animate creation. 



Down the moat, between the old wall embroidered 

 with ivy-leaved toadflax and crowned with the vinous- 

 pink, white and purple clusters of comfrey and many 

 other damp-loving plants, the swans would pass in 

 procession with their three cygnets behind them. A 

 water-hen was in charge of three chicks and a duck of 

 eight, and as the pageant advances the water-hen 

 summons her little black folk into the ivy of the bank, 

 and the duck gives an imperative cluck to her yellow 



