ABSENCE OF BIRD LIFE. 147 



The absolute stillness of a great forest, in certain 

 conditions of the atmosphere, is one of those things 

 that a man must have felt and experienced in his own 

 person, before he can appreciate it ; nearly every writer 

 upon sporting or travelling through such localities 

 seems to have been struck by it. 



As a rule the great forests of the world are not 

 made bright, like our English woodlands, by the merry 

 twitter of small birds ; at home we rarely go far through 

 the trees without catching sight of a rabbit or two, or 

 some other species of small game, either furred or 

 feathered, however insignificant; but in the great 

 domain of Nature's primeval woods, these petty details 

 seem to be, as it were, swallowed in the vastness of 

 the interminable wilderness of trees, where the voice 

 of the bird is usually conspicuously absent: indeed 

 experienced woodsmen regard the presence of these 

 songsters as indicative of the neighbourhood of human 

 habitations, round which, it is a fact attested by many 

 travellers of authority, these birds congregate, fol- 

 lowing in the train of human occupation, and making 

 their haunts near houses and villages. This for in- 

 stance was the constant experience of Dr. Livingstone 

 in his African travels, who states that though "birds 

 of song are not entirely confined to the villages, they 

 have, in Africa, so often been observed to congregate 

 around villages, that when we approach the haunts of 

 men, we know the time of the singing of birds is 

 come ; " * and the great doctor even goes so far as to 

 assert that when native villages are deserted by their 

 human inhabitants (a thing of frequent occurrence in 



* Expedition to the Zambesi, by David Livingstone, publ. 1868, 

 p. 65. 



