i88 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



musical instruments used by men to the ears of listen- 

 ing 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 temper- 

 ate 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, 



