CHAPTER V 



MY FAVOURITE SONG BIRDS 



I AM a loiid-listener as well as watcher. Perhaps the former is 

 the more difficult accomplishment of the two, as it requires a 

 musical ear, and an abundance of personal contact with birds, to 

 obtain any real measure of success. I feel, too, as a result of 

 my own experience, that to be able to tell a bird by its call, cry, 

 or song (and especially the latter), affords more pleasure than 

 even a close sight of the actual soloist. I do not wish to dis- 

 count a bird's winning ways, its engaging habits, fascinating 

 form, colour, and flight, but to emphasise that, whilst I am always 

 watching birds, I am also constantly listening to them. Another 

 point that should not be lost sight of is that, by cultivating one's 

 ear, one is able to obtain a fund of quiet enjoyment from contact 

 with birds at a time of year when the feathered race are hidden 

 among a wealth of foliage, and their forms are thus more difficult 

 to see. 



During the English Summer, when we have among us the 

 finest song birds in the whole world, the trained ear can detect 

 individual bird-songsters, and one is thus able to participate 

 in the great chorus of music which is produced on such a May 

 morning as that on which I write. 



The unmusical or unreceptive ear fails to respond to the 

 various strains that are being uttered, to him (or her) the bird 

 orchestra is strangely void of orderly concert, and the soloists 

 themselves are lost in the remarkable outburst. 



I stood this morning watching the chaplet of May, and as I 

 fixed my gaze upon the milk-white bloom of a Blackthorn bush, 

 now crowned with a billowy mass of flowers, and listened to the 

 soul-inspiring chorus, I felt strangely alone with Nature in a 

 wide, and, oftentimes, unthinking world. Above me the Tree 

 Pipit soared and sang in never-ending rhapsody. It was in the 

 old-loved spot where I look and listen for the same succession 

 year by year. A Sedge Warbler chattered its jerky notes upon 

 my right, a Willow Warbler uttered its sweet dulcet strain upon 



73 



