136 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



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 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 



