IV. Pied Stilt.

The Pied Stilt nests in sparse vegetation on the edges of lagoons, tarns, and lakes; river-beds, too, are favourite breeding grounds. From the former type of site the species has of late not infrequently been driven by settlement; the latter is still available, though exposed to dangers not known in former times. Nowadays, with the destruction of ancient vegetation and the hardening of ground, the surface of New Zealand has changed from sponge to slate; comparatively small precipitations produce spates; river-beds are swept by sudden heavier floods. To these disabilities of modern date the Pied Stilt opposes a prolific ovary, a breeding season spread over several months of the year, and a world-wide experience of weather conditions. Thus colonies are easily induced to alter their breeding grounds, and many instances are known to me of Stilt leaving a locality in a body, after disaster to early page 26 clutches. This habit of mind, primarily induced no doubt by climatic vicissitudes, has apparently been extended to include any disaster such as spoliation by man. It is certainly of assistance to the breed.

The structure of nests varies with environment. I have found them among the wiry seaside grasses of dunes and links really well built. On the other hand, the eggs sometimes lie bare or almost bare in a depression among naked stones. They are not symmetrically arranged as are the eggs of many species; the pointed ends do not elegantly meet in the centre of the nest. They lie as they are reproduced in the illustrations, untidily, with no attempt at neat stowage. They vary from three to four—oftenest four; their ground colour is a deep brown, with dark spots chiefly on the thick ends.

Amongst species cunning to beguile intruders, there are none whose methods of simulated injury and death are more strange and bizarre than those of the Pied Stilt. Dancing, prancing, galumphing over one spot of ground, the stricken bird seems simultaneously to jerk both legs and wings, as strange toy beasts can be agitated by elastic wires, the extreme length of the bird's legs producing extraordinary effects. It gradually becomes less and less able to maintain an upright attitude. Lassitude, fatigue, weariness, faintings—lackadaisical page break

Pied Still arranging Nest

page break page 27 and fine ladyish—supervene. The end comes slowly, surely, a miserable flurry and scraping, the dying Stilt, however, even in articulo mortis, contriving to avoid inconvenient stones and to select a pleasant sandy spot upon which decently to expire. When on some shingle bank well removed from eggs and nests half a dozen Stilts—for they often die in companies—go through these performances, agonising and fainting, the sight is quaint indeed.

During the course of their long-drawn-out breeding season, it is always possible to get a nest with eggs at the most favourable period for photography—that is to say, within a few days of hatching. On my first afternoon such a nest was discovered, the hen Stilt sitting, the male standing sentinel on the bank above. It contained the usual quartette of eggs, but was remarkable in its strange parsimonious dearth of lining. The eggs rested on a single bit of yellow bent. This sere short grass stalk was the bird's first care upon each of her home-comings. With shanks too long to work it comfortably otherwise, standing with one of her thin stilt-like legs angled like a half-opened pocket rule, it was marshalled, it was set out, it was rearranged. At first I regarded the straw as a mere ordinary straw, thousands of which lay strewn about the river-bed. Then I became impressed—it was impossible not to page 28 become impressed. Her alterations of it were no mere careless touches: it was picked up and shifted bodily across the nest; it was interwoven with the eggs; it was poked about on the sand in cabalistic posturings; it was manipulated in occult tracings. Often for moments together she would stand upright on her long legs, motionless, rejoicing over the subtlety of some master-stroke. She can have envied no other Stilt its nest, its mate, or the spotting of its eggs. With them and the straw, combinations were possible—after all, Shakespeare's works are built out of twenty-five letters—that could never during one period of incubation weary or pall. To watch her was to wonder if indeed she was not by some strange inversion or warp of instinct really brooding on the straw, and using the eggs as mere letter-weights to safeguard it from the gusts that issued from the rocky gorge. On no single occasion, at any rate whilst there yet remained eggs in the nest, did she fail on return to weigh it down, to readjust it to her fancy. Like Mr Pecksniff's insistence after the banquet at Mrs Todgers on a little drop to drink, it seemed a mania.

As had been anticipated, three or four days after the erection of the screen two of the eggs hatched. There lay one morning some yards distant from her nest a couple of tiny chicks still as death, and stretched out flat like the grey page break

Pied Stilt Sitting.

page break page 29 scum of sun-dried river-weed. Thinking that the hen bird would the sooner return with a light heart, I replaced these chicks in the nest still containing the two unhatched eggs. To my surprise, however, she would not sit at all. Unable to fathom her reasons, I wondered at what seemed a sudden perverse mistrust of the screen. Each of us consequently endured a morning of anguish, she fearing to return to her eggs lest my evil eye should fall on her tender offspring—of course she believed them undiscovered—and I fearing that to save the lives of the chicks and the vitality of the eggs my screen would have to be removed. I was indeed in the very act of trekking—I had given myself five minutes more—when even more desperate than myself she approached and lured the chicks from my wicked proximity. Her uneasiness and anxiety, as I afterwards understood, were consequent on the knowledge that the chicks should not have been in the nest at all—where in my ignorance I had placed them—that they should have been running with the cock bird. Having got them away and delivered to her mate, who, like little Peterkin, “stood expectant by,” she returned with perfect composure and confidence to her straw and two remaining eggs, and settled down under my very nose.

Chicks of Pied Stilt, immediately after emerging from the shell, leave their nest, and at once begin page 30 to feed among the shingle, sand, and smooth boulders. They obtain their food easily, I should imagine, for insect life on a river-bed is plentiful. The male, as we have seen, looks after the newly hatched nestlings, the hen continuing to incubate the remaining eggs. When the whole family are out of the shell the duties of supervision are shared. Male and female Stilt have in fact departments of work, duties as distinct as those of English servants. Thus although in the neighbourhood during the whole morning, the male did not seem to consider himself in any way bound actively to assist his wife; the chicks were in her nest, and whilst there were under her charge. It wasn' the work he had been engaged to do. Directly, however, the youngsters were out on the river-bed they were within his sphere of influence. It was he who led them, fed with them, and when the tiny creatures grew tired, hid them amongst the friendly stones. As yet, however, the parental customs of the breed continued to be misinterpreted by me. I still believed the hen's refusal to sit during the morning was due to some freakish distrust of the screen or camera. Again, therefore, in the afternoon when returning from lunch beneath the neighbouring willows, I searched for, discovered, and replaced the chicks on their nest. Once more the same line of action was followed by the hen, except page 31 that her hesitation to withdraw the chicks was less prolonged. The weather had changed; a chill sou'wester was blowing out of a grey sky. Her eggs, the Stilt knew, could not, as in the morning, for any length of time safely remain uncovered. Once more it was wonderful to see the enticement used to withdraw the chicks, the agony of supplication put into her attitudes. Crouching, courtesying close to them, with her long legs half folded up, she made of herself a parallel plane to the earth, her body close to the ground inviting to cover, her wings and tail uplifted and outstretched. Thus were the chicks again coaxed from the neighbourhood of the camera and screen. Then, as before, the male took them into his care, whilst the hen, after due inspection and rearrangement of her straw, settled happily on her eggs.

Watching these Stilt nestlings and their parents, I got a glimpse of that austere affection with which chicks are reared, and which forces the little ones, however frail and however young, to work out their own salvation. To be severely stern is but to be wisely kind. From the earliest dawn of life, direct assistance, direct interference, would prove at best but a procrastination of catastrophe. Mankind, especially the wealthier section of mankind, may be able to play with the question of education; the schools of the brutes must really page 32 fit them for the struggle of life. Their senses must be sharpened from birth; they must be bred to mastery of their environment. I believe myself no compassion need be wasted over these free creatures of an underworld to ours. Within a narrower pale their lives are probably happier than those of men. Man has not yet stepped into his kingdom to come; he is still imperfectly adapted to his surroundings.

In front of my screen, extending far up the river-bed, lay a narrow stretch of shallow water, a backwater of the main stream. Warm, safe, and calm, it was a favourite playground of the little Stilts. There, about the size of walnuts and buoyant as corks, they loved to disport themselves. This water, usually so calm, had now a big ripple on it; clouds had come up from the south; a dry gale was blowing grit and sand in clouds along the whole river-bed. In some way or other one of the chicks had got into this water space, and was being blown towards the junction of backwater with main stream. The male, now for the first time entirely regardless of my presence, began to show his anxiety in agitated flight and yapping cries; the hen, catching his alarm and leaving her straw and two eggs, presently joined him. Quite evidently they realist that the chick was being carried towards the river, big and dangerous. The passage from page 33 the backwater once reached, the chick would have been rapidly carried down-stream, the parents or one of them following on wing for some considerable distance. At last the little creature would have been lost in some raging rapid, and the old bird would have returned to the remaining chick and eggs. Even, however, in the chick's present desperate strait and with this catastrophe foreseen, encouragement only was given, not direct assistance. By perpetual calling and piping, by wading knee-deep into the water, though not actually breaking the wind and the ripple, as could have been done, and by spreading themselves again and again on the bank in all sorts of alluring shelter attitudes, the chick was encouraged himself to redouble his efforts. By a few yards he escaped, with at least one lesson thoroughly learned, and with moral fibre unimpaired by enervating aid.

Rescue accomplished, the yapping of the anxious parents ceased. Silence again fell on the riverbed, the male reuniting the parted chicks, the hen returning to her yellow bent and eggs. Because it was the last evening of my trip I scattered the scant material of my screen in case it should attract attention. Disturbed at the devastation, and of course unaware of my beneficent motive, the hen temporarily left her nest. It was no long vacation. I saw her presently page 34 return, and knew from her long bill pointed to the ground, from her disjointed, angled, broken-legged attitudes, that the old happy infatuation persisted to the last. With the enduring joy of the creative mind, she was once again at work upon her solitary straw.