GRASSHOPPER WARBLER. /I 



hundred yards' distance, and when close to your ear, is 

 scarce any louder than when a great way off. The 

 country people, when you tell them that it is a bird, will 

 hardly give you credence." 



The late Rev. C. A. Johns, in his British Birds in their 

 Haunts, gives a most interesting description of an inter- 

 view with the Grasshopper Warbler, from which I 

 venture to make a few extracts : 



" I never passed through a certain valley and wood 

 on the skirts of Dartmoor without feeling myself com- 

 pelled to stop once and again to listen to the monoto- 

 nous whirr of what I had been told and what I believed 

 to be the note of the large green grasshopper or locust. 

 ' Monotonous' is, perhaps, not the right word to use; for 

 an acute ear can detect in the long unmusical jar a 

 cadence descending, sometimes a semitone, and occa- 

 sionally almost a whole note ; and it seemed besides to 

 increase in loudness for a few seconds, and then to 

 subside a little below the ordinary pitch. The song of 

 this bird is but an exaggeration of the grasshopper's 

 note, and resembles the noise produced by pulling out 

 the line from the winch of a fishing-rod ; no less con- 

 tinuous is it, nor more melodious. On one occasion in 

 Hertfordshire, I crept quietly towards the spot whence 

 the noise proceeded ; the sound ceased, and the move- 

 ment of a twig directed my attention towards a 

 particular bush, on which I saw a little bird about as 

 big as a Hedge Sparrow, quietly and cautiously drop- 

 ping, branch by branch, to the ground. In a few 

 minutes I observed it again a few yards off, creeping 

 with a movement resembling that of the Nuthatch up 

 another bush. Having reached to nearly the summit, 



