AVALON AND A BLACKBIRD 189 



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 notation. 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 interesting 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 astonish- 

 ment and admiration growing all the time, and I was 



