Birds by Land and Sea 



with him would imagine, from his excited antics and 

 the medley of song-notes with others which sound 

 more like highly argumentative speech, that he had 

 come home in a towering passion no wife, no 

 house, no anything " Gr-r-r-r ! " But those who 

 have met the whitethroat before, know that it is only 

 his way. He has come back, in fact, bubbling over 

 with life, vivacious and loquacious to the last degree. 

 Now he threads the close thicket, grumbling quietly 

 to himself, like one who plays the scold ; then he 

 comes to the top and, with odd gestures, as of one 

 turning repeatedly from one side of an audience to 

 the other, pours out a flood of gabbling notes, with- 

 out order or musical quality. Anon, he springs 

 upward and outward, prattling as he goes ; then 

 breaks back on the same line, descending, with wings 

 thrown back like a snipe, to the spot from which he 

 rose, and where he resettles, prattling still. He has 

 no sooner settled than he is up and off again, singing 

 as he flies, to the lower branches of a tree, where he 

 clambers about the twig-ends in search of the small 

 life lurking on the under sides of the leaves. If a 

 female appears, he gives chase at once, and the two 

 double in and out of the hedge in a marriage-by- 

 capture style, their white throats flashing as they go. 



It may have been due to their late arrival in this 

 country that the whitethroats this year made such 

 short work of courtship and espousals ; for although 

 it was only on the 8th May that I saw my first 

 whitethroat, on the I5th I photographed the nest 



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