SONGS OF CHEER 



BESIDE the dove, the white-bibbed dipper is beginning 

 his Winter song, a sweet, if low-pitched 

 A melody. The Derbyshire dippers may seek 



Burnside out mudflats of tidal rivers as Winter comes 

 Minstrel on; others are faithful to their favourite 

 river-stretches the year through. A North- 

 country name is " Betty dowker," a dowker being one 

 who continually bobs the head, as the dipper does 

 unceasingly while it jerkily flits from rock to rock, or 

 runs or oars itself with its wings in the stream. This 

 little bird always strikes a pleasing note, alike by its 

 lively presence and its charming Winter song. 



OUR fathers dubbed the little wren, " troglodyte "; and 

 it is a veritable cave-bird in hard weather 

 The Cave and in snow-time, when in some deep old 

 Bird lane it spends the day hopping in and out 



of the hedgebank's holes and crannies, 

 among the exposed tree-roots. Here it picks up a fat 

 living when birds of the open are reduced by two days' 

 snow to skeletons, when redwings are to be picked up 

 from the hedgerows, and the song is frozen in the lark's 

 throat. Wrens of stream-sides live in the manner of 

 snipe during frosts, and their tiny rounded wings and 

 long bills for probing allow them to slip readily through 

 the frozen grasses of the banks. The French call the 

 wren, " Father of the woodcock," from a similarity in 

 the plumage of the birds, whose habits have this curious 

 affinity. 



SOME Cornish naturalists claim that their little home- 

 keeping wren of the stone hedge is a distinct race, 



M7 



