Stone Age man had doubtless learned to take advantage of birds that had regular and predictable habits which made them easier to catch. The flightless condition assumed by wildfowl after breeding must early have attracted attention. Suitable ponds were being turned into decoys by the reign of King John (1199–1266) and were equipped with netted pipes into which the birds were driven, especially flappers in July. The more sophisticated Dutch technique, whereby dogs were employed to appear from behind a series of screens to arouse the curiosity of the ducks and so entice them up the pipes, was not introduced to Britain until the sixteenth century.
It was soon realised that certain dogs were more effective than others; those most resembling a fox in colour and shape seemed particularly useful, presumably because ducks have evolved responses to stimuli originating from natural predators because these have biological significance. The last commercial duck decoy at Nacton in Suffolk has only just ceased operating for profit and has been acquired by the Wildfowl Trust as a centre for the ringing and scientific study of wild duck. The regular migration of wood-pigeons through the valleys of the Pyrenees has enabled the development of a local trapping enterprise by the Basque bird catchers. Long nets are strung across the valleys into which the pigeons are decoyed by men stationed in towers sited along the valleys. These men throw white bats resembling table tennis rackets under the passing flocks, and the white flash stimulates a following response in the birds, causing them to fly lower and lower and finally into the nets.
The role of birds in culture up until Norman times followed a primitive urge to increase the fertility and ease of capture of prey, and was based to a large extent on superstition, fable and omen; the drumming of woodpeckers caused them to be accredited with rainmaking abilities and black-coloured birds were associated with the devil. The Norman love of jousting and tournament combined with twelfth- and thirteenth-century religious influences to produce the heyday of heraldry – an extension of mystical symbolism, both in a military form with such subjects as the eagle and owl, and with the Christian dove and pelican. Bird art in Britain was also much in the hands of the ecclesiastics, and as Tudor points out, certain birds still featured mostly in religious symbolism, as they had in ancient Egyptian civilisations: the hawk was the emblem of Horus, the Sacred Ibis that of Throth, and they were much used for decorating illuminated manuscripts, psalters and breviaries. Between the Middle Ages and the late Baroque, and particularly in the Florentine schools of art, small birds occur as accessory symbols in hundreds of devotional paintings, over three-quarters being goldfinches. Gold wings and the bird’s association with thistles (crown of thorns) made it a symbol of the resurrection and of the soul, but it has also featured as an augur of disease, particularly plague. Friedmann, who tells us this, notes that in nearly all cases the artist has depicted a docile bird; only Michelangelo (in a marble relief now in Burlington House) showed it in a realistic, albeit symbolic attitude fluttering and scaring the infant Christ. The freer use of birds in art came with the Renaissance – but that is outside the scope of this book. Readers interested in the role of birds in music, painting and literature are recommended to read the excellent pen picture provided by Fisher (1966) or specialist works, a few of which are mentioned in the bibliography.
Our knowledge of ornithology in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries remains extremely scanty, though it is unlikely that man was doing much harm to wild life, especially after the ravages of the plague had reduced the population by nearly half. In 1348, when the Black Death started, the priors of the Monastery of Durham were finding rooks and crows sufficiently numerous on their manors to require thinning and they were enjoying young rooks in season. James I later passed an Act in Scotland in 1424 requiring them to be kept in check. Under-population and under-privilege for most country dwellers, and the decline of the monasteries and their dissolution were associated with agricultural stagnation; in 1500 there were about three sheep to each one of 2½–3 million people. Yet in the mid-sixteenth century emerged the farmers of foresight, who set the pattern of agriculture for years to come. Sir A. Fitzherbert’s Book of Husbandry published in 1534 shows that his knowledge of land drainage and preparation, and of the culture of corn, could set him on a par with the modern barley barons. Both he and Thomas Tusser were among the earliest advocates of enclosure, both emphasising the wastefulness of the old open field system which prevented the development of winter corn growing. Tusser (1573) writes:
The flocks of the lords of the soil,
Do yearly the winter corn wrong,
The same in a manner they spoil,
With feeding so low and so long
And therefore that champion field,
Doth seldom good winter corn yield.
It may be that this early enclosure was creating the right conditions for the proliferation of the corvids. Henry VIII passed an Act which having specifically stated that choughs (jackdaws), crows and rooks had increased and were injuring corn, directed that all persons possessing land were to destroy them. Parishes of at least ten households had to provide nets and facilities for catching the adults and meet annually to agree how best to destroy all the young. Much of the content of this Act was revived in another passed by Elizabeth I, in which provision was made for destroying ‘noyfull fowls and vermin’, including the corvids, buzzard, kite, osprey, harrier, woodpecker, kingfisher, shag, cormorant, bullfinch; and authority was given to the churchwardens to pay a bonus for destruction of these birds, ranging from one to four pence. The money came from taxing the landowners. Henry, or his advisers, clearly had the wits to realise that bonus schemes can be abused, because it was expressly forbidden to make payment for these birds if taken in any park, warren or ground employed for the maintenance of any game of conies, or for any ‘stares’ taken in dove-houses or kites and ravens killed in and around towns; but we do not know how these rules were enforced. A Government subsidy of one shilling and later two shillings was being paid on the tails of grey squirrels until stopped in 1958, and there were those enlightened gentlemen who trapped the animals, cut off their tails and released the creatures in hope that the progeny would provide further remuneration.
The era of the country house dawned in the sixteenth century and ornamental estates and parks blossomed in the seventeenth, and it became increasingly fashionable to keep ornamental birds. Aviculture was not new, the Romans having long before indulged their love of keeping exotic animals in captivity, one result being the introduction of the pheasant Phasianus colchicus to Britain. Increasing travel and interest in science led in turn to more attention being paid to wild life. Charles II had his pelicans and other birds in St. James’s Park, and the climate of opinion in which he founded the Royal Society was appropriate to experimental science, and led to the introduction of various exotic plants and animals, including the red-legged partridge (unsuccessful introduction attempted in 1673) and Canada goose. The rise of the squirearchy was also marked by the appearance of various game laws in the Restoration period, forcing the farmers and yeomen to make unpopular sacrifices in order that the squire could shoot, just as the King by means of the forest laws had supplanted all classes in preceding ages. The cross-bow, firing metal bolts, had been the important weapon until this time; but now the shot-gun replaced hawking as the gentleman’s means of relaxation. It became more common during Charles II’s reign, though not without much controversy, to shoot pheasants in flight instead of simply stalking perched birds or walking them up with dogs. Birds were caught for food with cross-bow, lime, snares, traps and nets, and nets were even used in sport. With the development of the shot-gun, it was gradually agreed that only certain species should be recognised as suitable for sport and be classified as game, and grouse and black cock were allotted to this category. The breech loading gun brought more controversy, just as double-barrelled guns and American repeaters were to do later, but it meant that birds could be driven over the guns and grouse shooting could emerge in about 1855, ensuring that from then on the nation’s parliamentary business finished in time for the glorious 12th August. Actually in 1915, a bill was passed in the Lords authorising the shooting of grouse on 5th August, so that those for whom the war gave less spare time could be ensured their full share of enjoyment. It is to the credit of the Commons that they rejected the bill, amidst shouts of ‘we want to shoot Germans not grouse’. So much have the priorities of men and birds become confused.
The arbitrary rules which grew up in connection with shooting are of interest and