144 Summer Studies of Birds and Books chap. 



to most of us in the London Zoological Gardens, for 

 we hear his voice resounding over Eegent's Park 

 long before we reach the Gardens and find that he is 

 the Crested Screamer. Mr. Hudson, in his Naturalist 

 in La Plata, has a most interesting chapter on this 

 bird, whose screaming, he tells us, is in its native 

 country a powerful and magnificent song. These 

 birds often sing all together in vast flocks at certain 

 intervals during the night. Mr. Hudson describes 

 an awful and overpowering burst of " melody " which 

 saluted him from half a million of voices at an out- 

 of-the-way spot in the pampas one evening at nine 

 o'clock ; and again how once at noon he heard flock 

 after flock take up their song round the entire circuit 

 of a certain lake, each flock waiting its turn to sing, 

 and duly stopping when the duty had been performed. 

 It is indeed difficult to imagine that the voice of the 

 birds in the Gardens coald ever be the vehicle of 

 real song ; but Mr. Hudson's account is explicit. 



There are one or two other little facts which I must 

 notice before I leave this part of the subject. Let 

 us consider for a moment the singing of our Warblers 

 — delicate birds which do not sing all the year or 

 most of it, as do the Eobin and the hardy ones I 

 mentioned before. Here, if anywhere, we might 

 expect to find the song exclusively used in the 

 pairing time. Yet it is not so ; the males arrive in 

 this country some days before the females, and if it 



