4 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



The woodpecker's laugh has the same careless 

 happy sound as in summer: it is scarcely light in 

 the morning before the small wren pours out his 

 sharp bright lyric outside my window ; it is time, he 

 tells me, to light my candle and get up. The starlings 

 are about the house all day long, vocal even in the 

 rain, carrying on their perpetual starling conversation 

 talk and song and recitative ; a sort of bird- Yiddish, 

 with fluty fragments of melody stolen from the black- 

 bird, and whistle and click and the music of the triangle 

 thrown in to give variety. So mild is it that in the 

 blackness of night I sometimes wander into the forest 

 paths and by furzy heaths and hedges to listen for the 

 delicate shrill music of our late chirper in the thickets, 

 our Thamnotrizon, about which I shall write later ; and 

 look, too, for a late glow-worm shining in some wet 

 green place. Late in October I found one in daylight, 

 creeping about in the grass on Selborne Hill ; and some 

 few, left unmarried, may shine much later. And as to 

 the shade-loving grasshopper or leaf cricket, he sings, 

 we know, on mild evenings hi November. But I saw 

 no green lamp in the herbage, and I heard only that 

 nightly music of the tawny owl, fluting and hallooing 

 far and near, bird answering bird in the oak woods 

 all along the swollen stream from Brockenhurst to 

 Boldre. 



This race of wood owls perhaps have exceptionally 

 strong voices : Wise, in his book on the New Forest, 

 says that their hooting can be heard on a still autumn 



