RING-OUZEL AS A SONGSTER 135 



as spero, hero, wheero, then whistle, musically, as 

 he is able, a loud brisk imitation of the word three 

 or four times in quick succession, and he will reproduce 

 the song well enough to deceive any person within 

 hearing that it is a ring-ouzel singing. The difference 

 will be that the whistled imitation will never get 

 the expressive bell-like musical character of the bird. 

 The sound has intrinsic beauty, but its charm is 

 mainly due to the place you hear it in, the wildness 

 and solitude of the rocky glens or the mountain side. 



By going all round the mountain, visiting every 

 clough, I succeeded in locating about forty or fifty 

 breeding pairs and failed to detect any individual 

 differences in their singing. As in other songsters, 

 the ring-ouzel lowers his voice when approached by 

 a man or when watched; when singing freely the 

 voice carries far, and may be heard distinctly from 

 the opposite side of a glen three or four hundred yards 

 wide, and refined by distance it has then a beautiful 

 bell-like quality. 



In May the ring-ouzels were mostly laying their 

 eggs when the earlier-breeding blackbirds were bring- 

 ing their young off. One day, within a ten minutes' 

 walk of the house, I spied a young blackbird out 

 among the rocks on the glen side, and captured it 

 just to hold it a minute or so in my hand for the sake 

 of its beauty, also to see what its parents would do. 

 They came at me in a fury, to flutter about within 

 two or three yards of me, screaming and scolding 

 their loudest; and very soon their noise brought a 

 pair of ring-ouzels on the scene to help them. Here 



