Afoot in England: Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Salisbury and Its Doves

Never in my experience has there been a worse spring season
than that of 1903 for the birds, more especially for the
short-winged migrants. In April I looked for the woodland
warblers and found them not, or saw but a few of the commonest
kinds. It was only too easy to account for this rarity. The
bitter north-east wind had blown every day and all day long
during those weeks when birds are coming, and when nearing the
end of their journey, at its most perilous stage, the wind had
been dead against them; its coldness and force was too much
for these delicate travellers, and doubtless they were beaten
down in thousands into the grey waters of a bitter sea. The
stronger-winged wheatear was more fortunate, since he comes in
March, and before that spell of deadly weather he was already
back in his breeding haunts on Salisbury Plain, and, in fact,
everywhere on that open down country. I was there to hear him
sing his wild notes to the listening waste--singing them, as
his pretty fashion is, up in the air, suspended on quickly
vibrating wings like a great black and white moth. But he was
in no singing mood, and at last, in desperation, I fled to
Salisbury to wait for loitering spring in that unattractive
town.

The streets were cold as the open plain, and there was no
comfort indoors; to haunt the cathedral during those vacant
days was the only occupation left to me. There was some
shelter to be had under the walls, and the empty, vast
interior would seem almost cosy on coming in from the wind.
At service my due feet never failed, while morning, noon, and
evening I paced the smooth level green by the hour, standing
at intervals to gaze up at the immense pile with its central
soaring spire, asking myself why I had never greatly liked it
in the past and did not like it much better now when grown
familiar with it. Undoubtedly it is one of the noblest
structures of its kind in England--even my eyes that look
coldly on most buildings could see it; and I could admire,
even reverence, but could not love. It suffers by comparison
with other temples into which my soul has wandered. It has
not the majesty and appearance of immemorial age, the dim
religious richness of the interior, with much else that goes
to make up, without and within, the expression which is so
marked in other mediaeval fanes--Winchester, Ely, York,
Canterbury, Exeter, and Wells. To the dry, mechanical mind of
the architect these great cathedrals are in the highest degree
imperfect, according to the rules of his art: to all others
this imperfectness is their chief excellence and glory; for
they are in a sense a growth, a flower of many minds and many
periods, and are imperfect even as Nature is, in her rocks and
trees; and, being in harmony with Nature and like Nature, they
are inexpressibly beautiful and satisfying beyond all
buildings to the aesthetic as well as to the religious sense.

Occasionally I met and talked with an old man employed at the
cathedral. One day, closing one eye and shading the other
with his hand, he gazed up at the building for some time, and
then remarked: "I'll tell you what's wrong with Salisbury--it
looks too noo." He was near the mark; the fault is that to
the professional eye it is faultless; the lack of expression
is due to the fact that it came complete from its maker's
brain, like a coin from the mint, and being all on one
symmetrical plan it has the trim, neat appearance of a toy
cathedral carved out of wood and set on a green-painted
square.

After all, my thoughts and criticisms on the cathedral, as a
building, were merely incidental; my serious business was with
the feathered people to be seen there. Few in the woods and
fewer on the windy downs, here birds were abundant, not only
on the building, where they were like seafowl congregated on a
precipitous rock, but they were all about me. The level green
was the hunting ground of many thrushes--a dozen or twenty
could often be seen at one time--and it was easy to spot those
that had young. The worm they dragged out was not devoured;
another was looked for, then another; then all were cut up in
proper lengths and beaten and bruised, and finally packed into
a bundle and carried off. Rooks, too, were there, breeding on
the cathedral elms, and had no time and spirit to wrangle, but
could only caw-caw distressfully at the wind, which tossed
them hither and thither in the air and lashed the tall trees,
threatening at each fresh gust to blow their nests to pieces.
Small birds of half a dozen kinds were also there, and one
tinkle-tinkled his spring song quite merrily in spite of the
cold that kept the others silent and made me blue. One day I
spied a big queen bumble-bee on the ground, looking extremely
conspicuous in its black and chestnut coat on the fresh green
sward; and thinking it numbed by the cold I picked it up. It
moved its legs feebly, but alas! its enemy had found and
struck it down, and with its hard, sharp little beak had
drilled a hole in one of the upper plates of its abdomen, and
from that small opening had cunningly extracted all the meat.
Though still alive it was empty as a blown eggshell. Poor
queen and mother, you survived the winter in vain, and went
abroad in vain in the bitter weather in quest of bread to
nourish your few first-born--the grubs that would help you by
and by; now there will be no bread for them, and for you no
populous city in the flowery earth and a great crowd of
children to rise up each day, when days are long, to call you
blessed! And he who did this thing, the unspeakable oxeye
with his black and yellow breast--"catanic black and amber"--
even while I made my lamentation was tinkling his merry song
overhead in the windy elms.

The birds that lived on the huge cathedral itself had the
greatest attraction for me; and here the daws, if not the most
numerous, were the most noticeable, as they ever are on
account of their conspicuousness in their black plumage, their
loquacity and everlasting restlessness. Far up on the ledge
from which the spire rises a kestrel had found a cosy corner
in which to establish himself, and one day when I was there a
number of daws took it on themselves to eject him: they
gathered near and flew this way and that, and cawed and cawed
in anger, and swooped at him, until he could stand their
insults no longer, and, suddenly dashing out, he struck and
buffeted them right and left and sent them screaming with fear
in all directions. After this they left him in peace: they
had forgotten that he was a hawk, and that even the gentle
mousing wind-hover has a nobler spirit than any crow of them
all.

On first coming to the cathedral I noticed a few pigeons
sitting on the roof and ledges very high up, and, not seeing
them well, I assumed that they were of the common or domestic
kind. By and by one cooed, then another; and recognizing the
stock-dove note I began to look carefully, and found that all
the birds on the building--about thirty pairs--were of this
species. It was a great surprise, for though we occasionally
find a pair of stock-doves breeding on the ivied wall of some
inhabited mansion in the country, it was a new thing to find a
considerable colony of this shy woodland species established
on a building in a town. They lived and bred there just as
the common pigeon--the vari-coloured descendant of the blue
rock--does on St. Paul's, the Law Courts, and the British
Museum in London. Only, unlike our metropolitan doves, both
the domestic kind and the ringdove in the parks, the Salisbury
doves though in the town are not of it. They come not down to
mix with the currents of human life in the streets and open
spaces; they fly away to the country to feed, and dwell on the
cathedral above the houses and people just as sea-birds
--kittiwake and guillemot and gannet--dwell on the ledges of
some vast ocean-fronting cliff.

The old man mentioned above told me that the birds were called
"rocks" by the townspeople, also that they had been there for
as long as he could remember. Six or seven years ago, he
said, when the repairs to the roof and spire were started, the
pigeons began to go away until there was not one left. The
work lasted three years, and immediately on its conclusion the
doves began to return, and were now as numerous as formerly.
How, I inquired, did these innocent birds get on with their
black neighbours, seeing that the daw is a cunning creature
much given to persecution--a crow, in fact, as black as any of
his family? They got on badly, he said; the doves were early
breeders, beginning in March, and were allowed to have the use
of the holes until the daws wanted them at the end of April,
when they forcibly ejected the young doves. He said that in
spring he always picked up a good many young doves, often
unfledged, thrown down by the dawn. I did not doubt his
story. I had just found a young bird myself--a little
blue-skinned, yellow-mouthed fledgling which had fallen sixty
or seventy feet on to the gravel below. But in June, he said,
when the daws brought off their young, the doves entered into
possession once more, and were then permitted to rear their
young in peace.

I returned to Salisbury about the middle of May in better
weather, when there were days that were almost genial, and
found the cathedral a greater "habitacle of birds" than ever:
starlings, swifts, and swallows were there, the lively little
martins in hundreds, and the doves and daws in their usual
numbers. All appeared to be breeding, and for some time I saw
no quarreling. At length I spied a pair of doves with a nest
in a small cavity in the stone at the back of a narrow ledge
about seventy feet from the ground, and by standing back some
distance I could see the hen bird sitting on the nest, while
the cock stood outside on the ledge keeping guard. I watched
this pair for some hours and saw a jackdaw sweep down on them
a dozen or more times at long intervals. Sometimes after
swooping down he would alight on the ledge a yard or two away,
and the male dove would then turn and face him, and if he then
began sidling up the dove would dash at and buffet him with
his wings with the greatest violence and throw him off. When
he swooped closer the dove would spring up and meet him in the
air, striking him at the moment of meeting, and again the daw
would be beaten. When I left three days after witnessing this
contest, the doves were still in possession of their nest, and
I concluded that they were not so entirely at the mercy of the
jackdaw as the old man had led me to believe.

It was, on this occasion, a great pleasure to listen to the
doves. The stock-dove has no set song, like the ringdove, but
like all the other species in the typical genus Columba it has
the cooing or family note, one of the most human-like sounds
which birds emit. In the stock-dove this is a better, more
musical, and a more varied sound than in any other Columba
known to me. The pleasing quality of the sound as well as the
variety in it could be well noted here where the birds were
many, scattered about on ledges and projections high above the
earth, and when bird after bird uttered its plaint, each
repeating his note half a dozen to a dozen times, one in slow
measured time, and deep-voiced like the rock-dove, but more
musical; another rapidly, with shorter, impetuous notes in a
higher key, as if carried away by excitement. There were not
two birds that cooed in precisely the same way, and the same
bird would often vary its manner of cooing.

It was best to hear them during the afternoon service in the
cathedral, when the singing of the choir and throbbing and
pealing of the organ which filled the vast interior was heard
outside, subdued by the walls through which it passed, and was
like a beautiful mist or atmosphere of sound pervading and
enveloping the great building; and when the plaining of the
doves, owing to the rhythmic flow of the notes and their human
characters, seemed to harmonize with and be a part of that
sacred music.

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