186 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



but in the way the bird throws out his notes anyhow, 

 until in this haphazard way he hits on a sequence of 

 notes, or phrase, that pleases him, and practises it 

 with variations. Finally, he may get fond of it and 

 go on repeating it for days or weeks. Every individual 

 singer is, so to speak, his own composer. 



In listening to a blackbird, even where there is no 

 resemblance to a man-made melody, it always appears 

 to me to come nearer to human music than any other 

 bird songs; that the bird is practising, or composing, 

 and by-and-by will rise to a melody in which the 

 musical intervals will be identical with those of our 

 scale. I recall the case of a blackbird of genius I once 

 heard near Fawley in the New Forest. This bird did 

 not repeat a strain with some slight variation as is 

 usually the case, but sang differently each time, or 

 varied the strain so greatly as to make it appear like 

 a new melody on each repetition, yet every one of 

 its strains could have been set down in musical nota- 

 tion. A musical shorthand-writer could in a few days 

 have filled a volume with records of its melodies, 

 and they would, I think, have been far more inter- 

 esting than the seventy odd recorded by Witchell. 

 No person who had listened for half an hour to this 

 bird could believe that these strains were borrowed. 

 They were too many and they came as spontaneously 

 as water gushing from a rock. The bird was in a thorn 

 hedge dividing two grass fields, and there I stood for 

 a long time, how long I do not know, in the fading 

 light, my astonishment and admiration growing all 

 the time, and I was like one in a trance, or like the 



