The Bird Watcher in the Shetlands/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
"DREAM CHILDREN"
VISITING these islands in the late summer impresses me with a fact that it is easy to forget, viz. that even the most oceanic of sea-birds—the wandering albatross or stormy petrel, for instance—pass almost as much of their life upon the land as the water. The breeding season is no slight matter, lasting but a short time. It goes on for months and months, and sometimes, from its earliest beginnings, must represent a period not very far short of half the year. On the ——shire coast, for instance, the terns appeared in the earlier part of April, and I was told by the fishermen that they stayed sometimes till well into September. How the gulls at the end of July stand congregated on their nesting-grounds, as if the business of matrimony were rather beginning than ending, I have already mentioned, and it is the same thing here in August with the guillemots. Everywhere the ledges are crowded with them, as they were when I last came in June—indeed, if there is any difference, the numbers seem even greater. But though there is the same general appearance, the glasses soon reveal the fact that, with very few exceptions, all the young birds are departed. Such as remain are no larger than the chicks I saw in the spring, and as most of the parents were then still incubating, besides that the young guillemot is known to leave the ledge whilst quite small, there is no room for doubt on this point.
No; the young are gone. Why, then, do the parents stay? They will rear no second brood, so that it seems as though they love the ledges better than the little fluffy things that they were feeding upon them, up to the moment of their departure. Affection apparently must be bounded by the sea, for whilst the parents, if we suppose them to have accompanied the chicks down, and swum about with them for a little, must have soon flown back, the chicks, owing to the undeveloped state of their wings, would have been unable to make the return journey. It would seem, therefore, that the first night after the down-flight must have separated mother and child for ever; but if this is the case we may well wonder how the rising generation of guillemots are able to support themselves. Up to now they have been fed upon the ledges, but henceforth they must dive and catch fish for themselves. That they should at once and of their own initiative acquire the skill to do this, or learn the art in so very short a time, from the parent birds, hardly seems possible. We must perforce suppose—or at least I must—that either the mother, as is most probable, or both the parents, remain with the chick for a little, feeding it now on the sea as they did before on the ledge, until in time—and no doubt very quickly—it learns to feed itself. But how strange, if this is so, that the grown birds return to the ledges and stay there day after day—I know not for how long—without laying a second egg. If they do not do so, then none of these birds can have bred. But the ledges are alive with them, and they are of both sexes. How long does the mother bird remain with her chick upon the sea, and does she, during such period, remain with it there at night, thus abandoning the ledges for a time altogether, though she afterwards returns to them, or does she fly up each night to the ledges, whilst the chick roosts upon some rock at the cliff's base, to be rejoined by its mother next morning? I cannot answer these questions in a satisfactory manner. It seems as though time must be wanting for such a little family exodus as I am here suggesting, for on the 16th of July, upon the occasion of my first visit, I left these same ledges crowded with guillemots, all, or almost all, of whom were still feeding their young, and now, on the last day of the same month, I find all the old birds still upon them, but nearly all the young are gone. This gives about a fortnight for the birds I left to have gone off to sea with the young ones, and returned to the ledges alone, supposing the exodus to have commenced almost on the day I went away. But did it? As the few chicks that are still here are just about as big as the others were at the time I left them last year, I shall be better able to judge of this when I see how long they stay.
Meanwhile, there is something to interest me under my eyes—a curious matter as it seems to me, which requires some sort of explanation. As I have said, but very few of these guillemots have still a chick to look after, but those that have not, often seem to be under the hallucination that they are blessed in this way. But a little while ago, for instance, a bird—one of such a childless pair—flew in with a fish, and running with it to its partner, both of them stood together drooping their wings, and, at the same time, projecting them forwards, so as to make that little tent, within which the young one is so characteristically fed. Always either one or both of them had the wings thus drooped, as though to shield and protect something, though "nothing was but what was not." Standing in this way, they passed the fish several times to and from each other, and, alternately bending their heads down till its tail hung a little above the ground, appeared to wait for an imaginary chick to take it from them. Now had the fish, which was a sand-eel, been held by the head in the tip of the bill, very little stooping would have been necessary for this purpose, and therefore I might the more easily have imagined what I here describe. But instead of this it lay longitudinally within the beak, so that only about an inch of the tail projected beyond it, as is very commonly the case. Therefore, when the birds bent down as a preliminary to moving the fish forward along the bill—which, however, they can do as well in one position as another—it was in a quite unmistakable manner that they did so, and, looking almost directly down upon them from the edge of the cliff, at a height of not more than twenty feet or so, I was enabled to see the whole process. Judging by their actions, any one would have said that these birds had a chick, and were feeding it; and calling up the many such scenes that I was witness of when last here, I can think of no point in which they differed from this present one, except in the presence of the chick. This curious make-believe, or whatever it may be called, lasted for some little time, but at last, I think, one of the birds ate the fish. Between them, at any rate, it swam out of the ken of my glasses.
And now, what is the meaning of all this? Many birds, of course, are in the habit of feeding one another—conjugally or loverly—or the male is in the habit of feeding the female, and this seems the most obvious and natural explanation here. I do not, however, think that this is a special trait of the guillemot, and inasmuch as there are but few young birds now, it is quite a rare thing to see a bird flying in with a fish in its bill. I believe, myself, that when a childless one does so, it is with the idea of feeding the chick—the last one, the one that it remembers and pictures as still on the ledge—in its mind; and it is the more easy for me to think this, because I feel sure that this habit of conjugal feeding has grown out of the feeding of the young, and I can even imagine that, by one of those mental transitions which with animals (as with savages) are so quick and so easy, the bird offering the food, does, occasionally and for a moment, put its partner in place of the young one.
We must not think only of the forgetfulness of animals—of their inability to retain past actions or events clearly in the mind, so as to remember them, long afterwards, in the way that we do. We should bear in mind, also, that they are influenced, like ourselves, by association of ideas, and that savages, whose psychology should stand nearer to theirs than our own, often confound the subjective with the objective—the idea of a thing in their mind, that is to say, with the thing itself, outside it. It would be quite natural, in my idea, that any of these guillemots should, by the mere catching of a fish, be reminded of the occupation it had for so long previously been engaged in, and the mental picture, thus raised, of the chick on the ledge, might well be so vivid as to overcome the mere negative general impression that it was no longer there. Under the influence of this delusion—let us say, then—the bird flies in with its fish, and, seeing it do so, its partner, by a similar association of ideas, is affected in just the same way, seeing also in its mind's eye—less blurred, perhaps, by innumerable figures than our own—a lively image of its child. What follows we have seen—a little play or pretence, as it looked like, on the part of the two birds, who thus, as it were, reminded one another of what both so well remembered. Of such conscious reminiscence, however, I do not suppose them to have been capable, but they may both, I think, have acted in something the same way that a bereaved mother may be supposed to, when she almost unconsciously lays out clothes or goes through some other once habitual process, in behalf of a dead child—forgetful, for a moment, or half-forgetful, of the change. All would have been brought about through association of ideas, one appropriate act suggesting and leading to others no longer so, but of whose propriety or otherwise the bird—or any animal—has probably but one means of judging—the presence or absence, namely, of the idea of them in its mind.
Now when, as Miss Kingsley tells us, a negro, chatting in his hut, turns with a smile or a remark, to his mother—deceased, but whom he supposes to be sitting in the accustomed place there—may not this also be through association of ideas, producing a strong visual image of what he has so long been used to see? There is hardly anything that so readily summons up the image, with the remembrance, of the dead, as the place where they lived or the objects amongst which they moved. How much, for instance, does the familiar chair suggest the presence of some one who used habitually to sit in it. "I know," says Darwin—referring to a visit to his old home after his father's death, which had occurred during his absence on the famous voyage—"I know if I could have been left alone in that greenhouse for five minutes, I should have been able to see my father in his wheel-chair as vividly as if he had been there before me."[1] If such an effect, so produced, may be strong—and it varies greatly—in the civilised man, it is likely to be much stronger in the savage, who does not distinguish so clearly between the world without him and what is in his own mind. To him, therefore, the visual image of a deceased person, that is summoned up by the sight of anything that more particularly appertained to him, during life, might well seem to be that person himself, and thus, as it appears to me, a belief might arise of the continual presence amongst us of the departed, even without anything else to help it. That there is much else—real, as well as seeming evidence—I know, or at any rate I am of that opinion. I do not write as a disbeliever in real apparitions, in clairvoyance, premonitions, thought-transference, or a host of other things, for I am one of those who really go by evidence in such matters—very few do—and to me no one thing in "this great world of shows" is in itself more wonderful or incredible than another—which is my own idea of what the scientific attitude of mind should be. But because there may be much that goes to prove what Myers calls the survival of human (which, to me, involves animal) personality after physical death, it does not, therefore, follow that the belief in man's immortality has originated through this, and still less that it could not have arisen without it. Association of ideas, producing a strong mental image, with the confusion between thought and objective reality, would, I believe, have been sufficient; for it must be remembered that man's ancestry leads up, through the semi-human, to the primeval savage, and it is amongst the lowest tribes of existing savages that the tendency last indicated is most noticeable. In regard to this, one should read Tylor, as likewise Clodd, concerning the probable effect that dreams have had in producing the idea of a soul. From the dream figure to that of our waking mind's eye there is but a step; and as animals dream, we may suppose that they likewise see mentally.
This seems clear, that wherever the visualising faculty—to give it a name—produced the image of anything, it would be mistaken for that thing if reason did not convince to the contrary. In animals reason is weaker than with us, but that the power of mental vision, within the narrower range of their experience, is weaker also, I can see no reason to conclude. Rather, I think, it is likely to be the other way, and this should make it an easier matter for a guillemot than for a negro to see, or seem to see, an absent relative. But possibly this vivid conjuring up of the mere outward form of anything may not be required in order to induce the belief of its being there. The negro, perhaps, rather feels the presence of his mother than thinks that he actually sees her; and might not this effect, also, be produced through a strong association of ideas? If so, this is all that would have been necessary to give man that belief in his immortal destinies which, upon the whole, we find him with.
- ↑ The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, p. 11.