Winter—Auroral Displays in the West Highlands always
indicative of a coming Storm— Corvus
Corax —Wonderful
Ravens—Edgar Allan Poe.
Snow continues to accumulate on the mountain summits
[December 1870], which all around, from Ben Nevis to Ben Cruachan, and
from the peaks of Glen-Arkaig to Benmore in Mull, now present so many Sierra
Nevadas, while
you are conscious at last, and to an extent that admits of no possible
mistake on the subject, that the wind, which, whether it blows adown the
glen or across the sea, has a chill and penetrating edge to it, is
neither the breeze of autumn nor the zephyr of summer, but the breath of
winter itself —the hoary-headed and icicle-bearded season, that, with
all its drawbacks, has its uses in the general economy as well as its
gentler confrers in
the annual. With the exception of one or two pet days, the weather of
the past fortnight has been stormy and wild, with heavy falls of rain on
the lowlands, and sleet and snow among the mountains. In no one season
since we first became a student of the heavens, now more than a quarter
of a century ago, have we had so many splendid exhibitions of aurora
bor calis as
the last three weeks have presented us with in a series of tableaux
vivants, which,
while they charmed and delighted the intelligent observer, made the
vulgar gape in astonishment and alarm. In every instance these auroral
displays have invariably been followed within twelve hours by heavy
gales of wind and much rain, and so constantly have we noticed this
sequence throughout the observations of many years, that there is
perhaps no meteorological prediction on which we should be disposed to
venture -with so much confidence and boldness as that within twelve or
fifteen hours of a bright auroral display there shall be a storm, and
that that storm shall bo of heavy rain or sleet, as well as of high
wind. We speak principally of the West Highlands, but we have no doubt
that observation would prove the phenomena to be the same throughout the
kingdom. If we were in command of a ship at sea, we should consider
ourselves quite as justified in making all necessary preparations for a
coming storm on the back of a brilliant aurora, as we should on
observing a sudden fall in the barometer, the only difference being that
the "merry dancers" give you longer notice of the approaching gale than
does the mercury. The latter exclaims, " Look out !" and if you don't
look out, and that instantly, calling all hands and making everything
snug, you come to grief, while time enough generally elapses after the
auroral warning, to enable you to prepare at leisure for the coming
storm, and, if it catch you napping, the fault is all your own. The
recent auroral displays seem to have been very general over the whole of
Europe, and are said to have been unusually brilliant in Canada and the
Northern States of America. A more than ordinarily severe and protracted
winter may be expected after all these aerial perturbations, which, when
a French savant remarked
the other day to a compatriot, "Tant
pis," replied
the chassepot-beariug mobile, with
the invariable shoulder shrug and grin, "Tant
pis pour Messieurs les Prussiens!"—thinking,
no doubt, of the disastrous retreat from Moscow, and hoping to see it
repeated in a different direction at no distant day. Except the wren and
redbreast, whose pluck is indomitable, and who are never altogether out
of voice, our singing birds are now songless and silent, or if they do
utter a note, it is but a cheep and a chirp, not a song, another sign
that our winter is to be regarded as having fairly set in. We notice,
besides, that some of our winter visitors from
Arctic seas have made their appearance along our shores,
while we observe that the rook and grey crow have already begun to
frequent the beach at low water in search of what may be picked up in
the way of a meal, a sure sign that they also look upon it as already
come, and that their food in more inland parts has disappeared until a
kindlier season has come round.
A very large raven (Corvtis
cor ax), the
biggest specimen of this bird we have ever seen, was trapped at the head
of Glencreran a few days ago by a bird-catcher that annually pays the
West Highlands a visit at this season. It was a female, as fat and plump
as a Michaelmas goose, and weighed within an ounce or two of four
pounds. The plumage, as might be expected in a bird of such high
condition, was perfect, with the exception of two of the upper alar
feathers, which were perfectly white, an abnormality, however, that only
rendered the specimen all the more interesting. The raven is the
craftiest and shyest of birds, never venturing within shot of
fowling-piece or rifle, and more difficult than any other bird, perhaps,
to be outwitted or circumvented in any way. With all his craft and
caution, however, the raven is, when occasion calls, one of the most
courageous and boldest of birds. At the time of nidification, for
instance, the male will fearlessly attack the largest falcon and drive
him from what he considers his own proper territory, nor will he shun
the combat, as we have often observed, even with the osprey or bald
buzzard when they met in mid air on their predatory excursions, and a
sufficient casus
belli has
been found or feigned by either belligerent. We remember seeing an
encounter of this kind several years ago, which continued nearly an
hour, and was a very pretty and interesting sight, the combatants
performing the most beautiful aerial evolutions as they charged, and
parried, and soared, and swooped in fierce and determined conflict. We
noticed that the raven frequently uttered his hoarse and threatening
croak, as if to intimidate his opponent, while the osprey fought in
perfect silence. The combat finally resulted in a drawn battle, the
belligerents separating as if by mutual consent, and slowly winging
their flight in opposite directions. The probability is that the raven's
pugnacity was excited on this occasion (March 1863) by the osprey's
cruising about, however unwittingly, in the vicinity of the precipice in
a cleft of which the female raven was at the time brooding on her nest.
At such a time the raven will boldly attack the passing eagle, and
harass and annoy it until the eagle, pestered and teased by the assault,
rather than in any way alarmed, with great good nature evacuates the
territory which the raven claims as its own. The raven has from the
earliest ages been accounted a bird of evil omen, and an object of
superstitious dread and awe, and allusions to the bird in this
connection are to be met with in the literature of most countries, the
raven being as cosmopolitan as man himself. Its croak, so disagreeable,
and dismal, and hoarse, and startling; its colour, a funereal black ;
its habitat, the lonely and demon-haunted mountain peaks, giddy
precipices, and dreary solitudes; its lamb-slaying and carrion-eating
propensities; its shy and suspicious manner, as if he knew that he had
done evil and was apprehensive of well-merited punishment—all combine to
render him in the first instance a noticeable and remarkable bird, and
one sure to be selected for frequent reference in the days of bird
divination, a superstition of which traces may probably be found in the
early history of every country, and thus it would readily be raised to
the "bad eminence" of a bird of evilest omen—
"The hateful messenger of heavy things,
Of death and dolour telling."
The Moor of Venice says—
"It comes o'er my memory,
As doth the raven o'er the infected house,
Boding to all."
And you remember Macbeth, and
cannot fail to catch the allusion—
"The raven himself is hoarse,
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements."
During his tour in the Highlands with Dr. Johnson,
Boswell writes a highly characterestic letter to David Garrick, and,
describing their visit to Macbeth's Castle,
says—"The situation of the old castle corresponds exactly to
Shakspeare's description. While we were there to-day, it happened oddly
that a raven perched upon one of the chimney tops and croaked. Then I,
in my turn, repeated 1 The
raven himself,' &c." Now, if a raven in truth did so perch, all we can
say is that it was a very curious place for a raven to be, or ravens,
within a hundred years, must have very much changed their habits and
nature. The explanation probably is that it was a tame raven,
or a rook perhaps, or, likeliest of all, that it was a common jackdaw (Corvus
monedula), a
pert, impudent, and garrulous little gentleman in black—no bigger than a
dovecot pigeon—that Mr. Boswell mistook (proh
pudor /)
for the grave, stately, and sagacious raven, who is as much bigger, and
weightier, and wiser than his loquacious cousin the daw, as Samuel
Johnson was bigger, and weightier, and wiser than his travelling
companion, James Boswell. It is curious to meet with the following on
the authority of no less renowned a personage than the valorous and
puissant knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, the flower of chivalry. " Have
you not read, sir," proceeds the knight, " the annals and histories of
England, wherein are recorded the famous exploits of King Arthur, whom
in our Castilian tongue we perpetually called King Artus, of whom there
exists an ancient tradition, universally received over the whole kingdom
of Great Britain, that he did not die, but that by magic art he
was transformed into a raven, for
which reason it cannot be proved that from that time to this any
Englishman hath killed a raven."
We have just called the raven our "friend," nor are w| at
all ashamed so to designate a bird whom we have known long, and
regarding whom, if other people speak nothing but evil, we at least can
speak a great deal that is good. There is a well-known proverb to the
effect that a certain potentate of sable hue is not so black as he is
painted, nor is the raven. First of all, he is an apt scholar, and a
bird generally of much sagacity, of long memory, and ready wit. It is on
record that on one occasion when the Emperor Augustus was returning
victorious from a battlefield, a tame raven that had received his
lesson, and remembered it to the letter, alighted on the conqueror's
chariot, and saluted him in these words —Ave
Ceesar, Victor, Imperator ! The
Emperor was pleased, as he well might be, and ordered the raven a
handsome pension for life. Bechstein, who probably knew more about the
habits and economy of ravens, especially in their tame state, than any
other ornithologist before his day or since, vouches for the facility
with which they may be taught to speak, and for their sagacity and
docility generally. He tells the following amusing story:—"A very clever
raven was kept at a nobleman's residence in the district of Mannsfeldt.
Among other things he could say, ' Well, who are you %' very strongly
and distinctly. One day, as he was walking about among the grass in the
garden, he observed a setter dog which remained near him, and kept
constantly walking after him. Not liking to be thus watched and
followed, the raven turned rapidly round and sternly exclaimed, ' Well,
who are you 1' The dog was alarmed at this, hung his tail, and ran
hastily away, and not until he had gained a considerable distance did he
turn round and howl." The raven, besides, is a thorough anti-Mormonite,
and wouldn't live in Utah for the world. If he visits the polygamist
colony at all, it is always under protest against the institutions of
that delectable land, and to be ready to pick the bones of the first
many-wived "elder" he may catch in
articulo mortis. Rather
should the raven be elected to a seat upon the bench of bishops, for he
is ever careful to fulfil the apostolic injunction to be the husband but
of one wife ; and until accident or old age deprives him of her, he is
the model and pattern of faithful and affectionate husbands, never
violating his conjugal vows, not even to the extent of the most innocent
of flirtations or the most Platonic of intimacies with a neighbouring
raveness, even though she should be younger, and sleeker, and glossier
than his own. The raven, in short, when he pairs, which he does at the
earliest moment permitted by the laws of ravendom, pairs for life, and
while his first choice is spared to him he will no more think of paying
court to another, be her charms what they may, than he will of dying of
hunger while there is a bone to pick, a tender lamb, or braxied sheep
within a circuit of a hundred miles of his eyrie, in the most
inaccessible cleft of yonder beetling precipice. "We might now say
something if we liked of the raven's usefulness in
the general economy as a hard-working and indefatigable inspector of
nuisances, and how putrid animal matter of every description disappears,
as if by magic, wherever he is known and appreciated; but this is a
utilitarian age, and as we hate utilitarianism, we are content merely to
hint that the raven deserves special regard as a sanitary reformer. We
prefer insisting on the fact that the raven is a gentleman of very
ancient descent, being able, in the clearest manner, to trace his
pedigree in unbroken line up to the days of "Captain" Noah himself, as
Byron irreverently styles the patriarch. When any one in our day becomes
distinguished and attracts our special regard, we instantly set to work
to trace his descent, and although he himself can hardly tell who was
his grandfather, we are never satisfied until we have, by hook and by
crook, traced his ancestry to the Bagman Roll or the Norman Conquest,
and, having thus ennobled him to our own entire satisfaction, we cease
not to pet and praise him until he is dead, and then the newspapers
swarm with obituary notices of the distinguished man who has just
departed, and a monument, erected by public subscription, concludes the
farce. The raven's ancestor was unquestionably with Noah in the ark, and
although he has incurred some odium in connection with the assuaging of
the waters, we confess we cannot well tell why, for all that the
ancient, and beautiful, and simple narrative says of him is this: "And
he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters
were dried up from off the earth." On the point of ancestry, in short,
there is no bird that has a better right to hold up his head than the
raven. And just consider: wasn't Dickens' stuffed raven "Grip" sold the
other day for a hundred and twenty guineas! although if his portrait in
the Graphic is
to be depended on, he never was a handsome specimen of the family, or if
he was, then the man who stuffed and "set him up" should have received a
flogging for his pains. Should the reader wish to know more about our
friend Corvus
corax, we
can confidently recommend him to make the acquaintance, the intimate
acquaintance if he can, of "The Raven" to be met with in the works of
Edgar Allan Poe, the most weird and wonderful raven that has ever yet
appeared in song or story. |