lo BIRD WATCHING 



the bird again touches the ground. All about now 

 over the warrens their plaintive, wailing notes are 

 heard, notes that seem a part of the deepening gloom 

 and sad sky ; for nature's own sadness seems to speak 

 in the voice of these birds. They swell and subside 

 and swell again as they are caught up and repeated 

 in different places from one bird to another, and often 

 swell into a full chorus of several together. Deeper 

 now fall the shadows, " light thickens," till one catches, 

 at last, only "dreary gleams about the moorland," 

 as now here, now there, the wings are flung up — 

 showing the lighter coloured inner surface — till 

 gradually, first one and then another, or by twos or 

 threes or fours, the birds fly off into the night, 

 wailing as they go. But this note on the wing is 

 not the same as that uttered whilst running over 

 the ground. The ground -note is much more drawn 

 out, and a sort of long, wailing twitter — called the 

 "clamour" — often precedes and leads up to the final 

 wail. In the air it comes just as a wail without 

 this preliminary. But it must not be supposed that 

 all the birds perform these antics simultaneously. If 

 they did the effect would be more striking, but it is 

 generally only a few at a time over a wide space, 

 or, at most, some two or three together — as by 

 sympathy — that act so. The eye does not catch 

 more than a few gleams — some three or four or five 

 — of the flung-up wings at one time over the whole 

 space. It is a gleam here and a gleam there in 

 the deepening gloom. " Dreary gleams about the 

 moorland" — for warren, here, purples into moor and 

 moor saddens into warren — is, indeed, a line that 

 exactly describes the effect. 



