202 BIRD WATCHING 



that they think you anywhere rather than where you 

 are ! It is like eavesdropping, it hardly seems right. 

 Now the nearest greenfinch picks out an ear of the 

 corn and, as if to show you just how he does it, comes 

 even a thought nearer. He turns it till it is crosswise 

 in his beak, snips off the stalk, rapidly divests it of 

 what remains of the outer huskiness in doing which 

 you see him work his mandibles in a delicate, tactile 

 manner and swallows the inner essence. Through- 

 out he does not help himself with his claws at all. It 

 is pleasant to see this, but still more so to have so 

 many little dicky birds just within a pace or two, all 

 free and unconstrained and knowing nothing whatever 

 about it. It is as if you had somehow got into a 

 bird-cage without alarming the inmates, but even as 

 this occurs to you you recognise the poverty of the 

 simile, and rejoice to be in nature's aviary at least 

 one may say this of the birds if not of the straw- 

 stack. 



There is now, besides chaffinches and greenfinches, 

 which form the great bulk of the numbers, quite a 

 little crowd of bramblings twenty or more their 

 beautiful gold-russet plumage gleaming out in an 

 easy pre-eminence of colour ; for they are, indeed, much 

 handsomer than the handsomest cock chaffinch or 

 greenfinch, and as both the sexes are alike, nothing 

 of them is lost, there are no dead-weights. Even the 

 yellow-hammers when at their yellowest cannot com- 

 pete with these chestnut beauties, and the pretty little 

 blue-tits who feed softly two or three together on 

 the poppy seeds are beaten, whether they confess it or 

 not. A hedge-sparrow or two hopping very quietly 

 and unobtrusively about on the outskirts of the great 



