ii4 MY NATURE NOTEBOOK. 



and in some leafy nook you may chance to be the 

 favoured audience of a bullfinch's whispered music, 

 or may hear with delight the perfectly finished per- 

 formance of that daintiest of rustic singers, the grey 

 linnet. But what are these solos, interesting and 

 charming as they are, compared to the full-throated 

 chorus of the spring, when blackbird and songthrush, 

 nightingale and blackcap, led a tireless orchestra whose 

 overture greeted the first grey of dawn, and whose 

 lingering finale dropped like liquid music into the 

 deep silence of the night ? 



THE HOSTS OF YOUNG BIRDS. 



More plainly, perhaps, than in blaze of roadside 

 flowers and silent groves you may read the signs of 

 passing summer in the flocks of sparrows that dust 

 the hedges wherever field crops are ripening. London 

 sparrows, with true Cockney instinct, insist now upon 

 having an outing in the country ; and in the farthest 

 fields of Kent and Essex, farmers note with grim 

 resentment the sooty tinge of town-bred sparrows 

 which reinforce the vulgarly vociferous hordes that 

 pass from field to field in advance of the harvest. 

 For the sparrow's brief spell of " useful " work is over. 

 He has fed his fat family full upon the lavish insect 

 wealth of June ; and as July draws to August he and 

 they become voracious vegetarians at the farmer's 

 expense. As noisy, and far more numerous in those 

 places where they assemble, the starlings are already 

 forming vast army corps that pass overhead to their 

 roosting sites in reed-bed or osier-patch with a rush- 

 ing sound as of the wind in a forest. Like the 



