Curlew in South Aj'rica. 23 



near Kiuiberley, and was touched on the tender chords of 

 sentiment to hear its'note so distant from the accustomed 

 moors in the neighbourhood o£ the Solway. He might have 

 met some of his countrymen at I'Cimberley who would confess 

 a preference any day for " the wheeple of a Wliaup to the 

 giggle of a Nightingale ^' ; though certainly at that stage of its 

 wanderings the Curlew could only give a feeble wintry reduc- 

 tion of that full, eerie, whinnying performance so effectively 

 imitated by Silver Sand, the Gipsy, in Crockett^s stirring 

 novel ' The Raiders/ 



AVe wonder if our poets have not been consciously playing 

 full-dress to the gallery in showing themselves so impression- 

 able towards the "unpremeditated lays ^' of the Nightingale, 

 Lark, and Thrush, that more or less make music their trade, and 

 wdiether their responses are not really in need of quickening 

 for that "Call of the Wild '^ there come from the forlorn 

 Curlew, or from a pair of Sea-Eagles screeching loudly 

 as they waltz in a moderate breeze high above our shore 

 headlands. These sounds in Nature seem to embody the 

 very spirit of the out-of-the-way scenes in which they are 

 beard. 



The C/urlew is a great traveller — cosmopolitan, indeed, as 

 regards the Old World. It nests upon the heaths and moors 

 of North-western Europe, including Britain, and also far 

 away in that unfamiliar part of the world called the Tundra 

 marshes of Siberia, amid dreary wastes of moss and lichen, 

 a million square miles of moss-hags frozen hard two-thirds 

 of the year, where the map shows here and there a hair, like 

 a streak of a river, drawn across regions of emptiness. The 

 rest of its life is passed south of the Line down to the Cape 

 here, on the one side, and via India right to New Zealand, 

 on the other. In those parts of South Africa where it mostly 

 congregates it is a shore-bird, and we know it best on the 

 KaH'rarian coast, where it occurs in fours and fives up to small 

 parties of nearly a score as the season advances. A few 

 remain all the year round, and why these also do rot go 

 away in seasonal migration we cannot exactly tell, any 

 more than it is known vet whv tlie odd ones remain in tlie 



