AVALON AND A BLACKBIRD 185 



wafted from musical instruments used by men to 

 the ears of listening birds. 



This is far from convincing. Some of our song- 

 birds are imitative in a much higher degree than the 

 blackbird, yet never come near to human music in 

 their songs. The cuckoo with us and numerous other 

 species all the world over, many of them in wild 

 lands where human-made music is never wafted to 

 their ears, do yet observe the same intervals as in 

 our own scale in their calls and songs. My belief is 

 that the blackbird sings in this way naturally, that 

 he approaches nearer to us in his musical scale just 

 as the grasshopper-warbler, the red night-reeler, and 

 the furze-wren go further from us and are like insects 

 in their music, simply because it is his nature to. 

 Blackbirds, we have seen, are distributed pretty well 

 all over the globe and are of many species, ranging 

 in size from those no bigger than a throstle to others 

 large as or larger than jays, but all have beautiful 

 voices which remind English travellers in tropical 

 forests and distant temperate regions of the home 

 bird, and in some instances it is said to sing better 

 than our bird. I think that if these travellers had 

 been specially interested in this subject and had 

 listened attentively to the exotic species, they would 

 have found that these too have phrases that sound 

 like fragments and snatches of human melodies. 



The blackbird often reminds me of the common 

 Patagonian mocking-bird, Mimus patachonicus, not 

 in the quality of the sounds emitted, nor in the shape 

 of the song, nor in any resemblance to human melody, 



