A Littoral City

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 6, 8 February 1923, Page 13

A Littoral City

(By H. J. M., in The Nation and the Athenaeum.)

The correlations of animate with inanimate nature are so intricate that the least oscillation of the latter from the - normal will often make a wilderness of a city or a city of a wilderness. "Early this year (1922) the sea scored a march against its human foeman on the tidal flats and shingle beaches of the east coast between Braucaster and Sheringham where the cliffs begin, and in an impetuous expense of its artillery hammered through a furlong of. concrete wall. On one side of the turf bank running between road and beach the land became a shallow broad, scrawled over with multiform islands like the hieroglyphs on the yellow hammer’s egg, and on the other, water and vegetation came to a deadlock and camped their indiscriminate forces over the ground. Into this tangle of alleys, squares, and streets, where the sedges, reeds, and water plants made the houses, and the water the open spaces, poured a multitude of birds and founded a city-state in Grecian fashion, but that it was quilted of many nations. Long, crescentic lines of black-headed gulls, burnished by the sun, girdled the seaward frontier of the city, like Crusaders after the taking of Jerusalem, and when they rose and drifted out to sea in silver clouds, the city’s glittering battlements seemed to have crumbled like Atlantis’s that were. A cluster of immature greater black-headed gulls, the van of the hosts which migrate along the coast in the autumn as very symbols of the darkening days, broke in from the north, and in at another gate a troop of sanderling dived in a cascade of white breasts, followed by a single knot who twisted down in the angles of lightning. A throng of cosmopolite citizens ambled the streets and squares in their several national costumes —-black and grey coots in their white shields, like the heraldic device of some order, a gallant one, judging by the number of duels; green-capped anti rufous-belted sheld-duck Tn white cloaks slashed with black; stockish and massive-billed shovellers in green, white, chestnut, and blue, with yellow spectacles, like aldermen in a free-colored Morris State; a full-plumaged scaup drake and his white-faced mate (the rarest hyperborean visitor in June), like pochard with black torso for red, or tufted duck at a distance without the crest; mincing waterhens; lapwings, tourists to Venice from inland plains; herons, lank, primitive, and spectral, like shadows of their ancestors swans like the figureheads, and hovering terns, the guardian angels of the city; linnets airy as their notes bustling and hallooing redshank; a tall greenshank like a redshank grown up and lost its mercurial spirits dunlin with the black breast-band of the nuptial season; little stint like its pigmy form, and the urchins of the sandpiper community and canty ringed plover. And as initial verses to this anthology sounded the skirl of the sedge-warbler, the wheeze of the reed-bunting, and the sweeter reed-music of the reed-warbler all along the rushes fringing the turfbank. The only unity governing the diversity was one of place, but the nurseries on the other side of the bank had an internal cohesion of common purpose. Two small islands almost flat with the water and shagged with tussocks of marram, other wiry grasses, and coarse turf, and patched with dry mud, held about 800 nests of Sandwich and common terns, black-headed gulls, ringed plover, and redshank.

They were mingled helter-skelter, lined or unlined, slovenly or compact, many so close together as to be semi-detached, (the nine Sandwich terns’ nests were within an orbit of three yards), and with eggs so variously shaded and mottled as to make classification of size rather than pattern, coloration, or even shape the clue to identity of species. The terns’ eggs and nests ran riot in idiosyncrasy, but those of the gulls were hardly less variable, spotted, zoned, and splashed with greys, blacks, and browns of every tone, on a ground of olive, green, buff, dark brown, or blue. Gulls are of a plover-like ancestry, and the ; black-head, diverging first to a sea-habit, then a land-habit, and here breeding almost within the spray of high-tide, was with his fancyroaming eggs and nests consistent in plasticity. One of them was a monument, a palace, a foot high, built on the highest point of the island and broad based on a-straddling foundation of interlacing r, sticks, thinning to the grassy f apex of the pyramid on which reposed, like a single blossom

topping a bush, or one lasting poem out of a lifetime of verses, a solitary egg. This pair alone among their brethren, some with mere twists of grass, had the swnoptic view of life they saw it whole in one sweep from the experience of memory to the prevision of inference; what tides have done before, spoke the tight logic of stick upon stick, tides may .do again. Only the lovely treasure of the redshank,* with its background of yellow or grey or both (lighter than the lapwing’s), and its rich daubs of purples and browns, is concealed in the heart of the tussock, where long grasses play their shadows over it, the fingers of the wind’s caress. Past the sheld-duck on the water, gowned so comely and so bizarre both, with her ducklings in their white down banded twice with Vandyke lines, and over on the mainland, the shelf between inland and outer sea, was an oystercatcher’s nest with the rare number of four eggs (streaked and printed grey-brown on a yellowish-grey ground color), walled with pebbles in a shingle depression. One was double-yolked and twice the size of the others, an oddity to make itch the thievish hand of the collector. Once an egg of this same pair rolled out of its hollow nearer the water, and they swung round and round the watcher’s head, wailfully hleep-hleepinf/, until he went to the nest and restored the egg. As I walked over the island the gulls hung screaming low over my head, a roof woven of white wings with the azure one of the world streaming through it. Here were three skies, and I marooned on a cloud in the lowest; but only the middle one lived with me, and that was all life, broken not only into a mosaic of moving lights but into full a thousand entities of brain and heart and nerve, and among them how many originals like that pair of gulls and oyster-catchers? The city was on one side of the bank, its corporate life on the other, for eggs and nests were safe in fancy-freedom by a common purpose of watch and ward which kept the peace within the ranks of the divers peoples (the gulls, as I was assured and could see for myself, did not touch the terns’, redshanks’ or plovers’ eggs), and every enemy except man and the elements without.

If there is no more individual shore-bird than the redshank, there is none so personable as the ringed plover. In social flight, when the flock becomes an individual and the birds its several organic parts like the words of a lyric, they resemble sanderling, little stint, and dunlin; they nest among the terns and gulls, as their fellow-waders (except the redshank) never do, and their charming little pear-shaped eggs, three and sometimes four, are similar, but for shape and position with their, narrower ends together in the middle of the nest, to the little terns’. They are not quite so variable in their markings, but I found one nest of four eggs with one pair pigmented to type and the other, cream-colored, without markings of any kind. The sides of the cupped nest are usually embossed with pebbles and broken shells, but I have seen a few nests among the gulls wound with grass bents. They are true to the volatile expression of their homes, impinged upon by the restless sea, suffused and rarefied by the elements, and they twinkle over, their native shore with -a run which seems another phase of flight, but always more waywardly than other small shore-birds, while their plumper and squatter build gives them an inexplicable pathos. Thus they maintain a fellowship of habit with their various associates and yet preserve an essence, unique and particular, of their own. There is an infallible method of finding out whether ringed plover have eggs or young. If the former, they content themselves with flying in circles round the intruder, with their soft plaints— peep, and toolce, foolce, the dissyllable being the nuptial call modulated into a quavering trill, when the male weaves his flight-mazes or slides along the ground with humped back and dragging wing. But if the latter, then the female becomes a Lyceum tragic actress in the convulsions of death. Actually she mimics the throes, creeping along in painful spasms with . one wing flapping in the air, the other lolling as though broken, and then, with head half buried in the shingle, rolls over from side to side and, with a last shudder, agonises

, . * All of which I was offered for a gift, so hated amoncr the gunners is the bird which alone of its family makes the interests of others its own, and with its clamor rouses the whole of the population in its neighborhood, each and every tribe, against their common foe. .

into a lifeless; tumbled heap. lam a stoat; my craving for blood is whetted, and I bare my teeth as I pad after her. A last paroxysm of life spurts up in her and carries her writhing and floundering another 20 yards. A bestial possession foams the blood through my arteries, and I go bounding after her, my snout dilated at the anticipated scent of her blood —and there she is flashing her silver wings over my head with a hey-nonny-toolee, and “Keep you low, my child, till I entice him this way and that way, far out of yours.” The crouching infant, three or four hours old in down of fawn and grey, rucks its nape feathers over the telling black collar and shams stone, but stones do not pulsate, nor, when picked up, wave stumps of wings and set off on long shanks to tumble head over ears over a rather bigger member of their order. The nest a few yards off has still one egg but no broken shells, which are carried off the nesting ground to give the younglings, one supposes, room and warmth under the parent’s breast at night. The little “dotterels,” as they are called locally, are, further, much more circumspect in going on to their eggs than the terns, who come home down the chimney, so to speak. The female returns in a series of runs and pauses, retreats, approaches, goes off at a tangent, sidles nearer, swerves away again, and finally makes a dash for it and settles deeply in with a sigh rippling all over her body. The eye leaves her, jumps over the waving beds of seacampion, threads its way among the hulks of the seals basking on the sandspit, and launches out to sea, swinging over the pale bar of the horizon into the immensity of space. The loneliness of the human mind is behind it, and it travels further than any winged citizen of this ’busy township, contented in the fulfilment of its single and commingled lives. And in space that mind is at home, building it with cities of its own workmanship, where all our quest is ended, our frustrations undone, and as these birds know a matchless freedom of body here, so we there an equal freedom of the mind.