i PREFACE 



their seasons, their eggs and their nests, their notes 

 and their food, their loves and their hates, their 

 merry courtships and their parental anxieties, their 

 intense local and family attachments, and their 

 still more imperious instincts of migration. In 

 other words, it aims at penetrating, as far as 

 may be, behind the bright eyes and few eyes are 

 so bright as those of a bird behind the graceful 

 shapes, the lissom movements, the beautiful mask 

 of feathers, to the eager little life, vivid, attractive, 

 mysterious, almost, but not, I think, quite impene- 

 trable, which underlies them all. By so doing, it 

 aims at creating an interest in birds, a sympathy 

 with them which, if once awakened, will, perchance, 

 never go to sleep again ; but like a love of flowers, 

 will give a kind of sixth sense to its possessor, 

 lending a fresh charm to every walk, to every copse, 

 to every hedgerow, peopling them with ever appear- 

 ing, ever disappearing, friends friends who were 

 hitherto unnoticed and unknown and enabling the 

 eye to see what it has never properly seen, the ear 

 to hear what it has never fully heard, and the 

 imagination to picture to itself what it has never 

 consciously imagined before. 



It will be observed that many, indeed most of 

 the birds which have most attracted me, which I 



