THE RING-OUZEL AS A SONGSTER 135 



The song is also variously characterised as desultory, 

 wild, monotonous, sweet, plaintive, mellow, fluty, which 

 is all wrong, and if hy chance one word had heen right 

 it would h:i\c given us no definite idea of the ring-ijuzel's 

 song — its shape. It is a whistle, repeated three and 

 sometimes four times without pause, uttered at short 

 intervals twenty or thirty or more times. Let the reader 

 think of any such word 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 mcjuntain, visiting every 

 clough, I succeeded in locating about forty or fifty breed- 

 ing 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 bringing their 

 young off. One day, within a ten minutes' walk of 

 the house, I spied a young blackbird out among the 



