156 NATURE IN DOWNLAND 



this bird. I sat still among bushes, where stonechats 

 were breeding, until they got over their anxiety or 

 forgot nay presence, and began to sing ; first one and 

 then another, and at last I had three singing within 

 hearing distance. To sing the stonechat flies up 

 almost vertically from his perch on the topmost 

 spray of a bush to a height of forty or fifty to a 

 hundred feet, and at the highest point pours out a 

 rapid series of double notes, the first clear and sharp, 

 the next deeper or somewhat throaty, then the clear 

 again, the sound rising and falling rhythmically; and 

 as he sings he drops rapidly a distance of a couple of 

 feet, then flutters up and drops again and again. It 

 is both dance and song, and a very pretty performance. 

 The whinchat's song is even less well known, or less 

 regarded, than that of its more conspicuously coloured 

 relation, the stonechat. Thus, William Borrer, in his 

 Birds of Sussex, expresses the opinion that this species 

 has no song; yet he had spent eighty years of his 

 long life in a rural district where the whinchat is 

 fairly common, and had been a lifelong observer of 

 the birds of his county. It is in fact a low gentle 

 song that cannot be heard far, and when other birds 

 are singing it is not regarded. The song is a warble 

 of half-a-dozen notes, and is hardly longer than the 

 redstart's song, with which it has been compared. But 

 it is not like it. The whinchat's best notes, though 

 low, have a full, sweet, mellow quality which makes 

 them comparable to the blackbird and the blackcap. 



