212 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



gemlike, winged bodies of strange shapes and gem-like 

 minds to match, they come upon us like a living glitter- 

 ing dust shaken from the tail of some comet in our 

 summer skies — a dust that will settle down by-and- 

 by and vanish when the air grows cool at the ap- 

 proach of winter. 



But little birds — dear little birds or darlings as we 

 may call them without rebuke — are vertebrates and 

 relations, with knowing, emotional, thinking brains 

 like ours in their heads, and with senses like ours, only 

 brighter. Their beauty and grace, so much beyond ours, 

 and their faculty of flight which enables them to 

 return to us each year from such remote outlandish 

 places, their winged swift souls in winged bodies, do 

 not make them uncanny but only fairy-like. Thus we 

 love and know them, and our more highly developed 

 minds are capable of bridging the gulf which divides 

 us from them, and divides bird from mammal. 

 Small as they are bodily, in some cases no bigger than 

 one of a man's ten toes, we know they are on the 

 same tree of life as ourselves, grown from the same 

 root, with the same warm red blood in their veins, 

 and red blood is thicker than water — certainly it is 

 thicker than the colourless fluid which is the life of 

 the insect. 



To come back to particulars, and the subject of this 

 chapter, there are very great differences in the temper 

 and behaviour of even the smallest birds of different 

 species in the presence of their human fellow-beings. 

 Some are strangely, unaccountably shy, and so sus- 



