STOCK-DOVES, WOOD-PIGEONS, SNIPE 57 



of birds that haunt the waste — which is instantly 

 followed by a swishing of the wings, making quite 

 a music in the air. When at its loudest and harshest, 

 this cry, which then becomes a scream, is quite an 

 extraordinary sound, having a mewing intonation in 

 it suggesting a cat as the performer. Yet it is nothing 

 so extraordinary as some notes of the snipe which I 

 have heard, mostly during the winter, and which are 

 indeed — at least they have struck me as being so — 

 amongst the most wonderful that ever issued from 

 the throat of bird. I will recur to them again when 

 I come to the moor-hen (for it was in his company 

 I heard them), a bird that is itself as a whole orchestra 

 of peculiar brazen instruments. These wild cries and 

 screams blend harmoniously with the curious, mono- 

 tonous, yet musical bleating, and come finely out of 

 the gloom of the evening thickening into night, as 

 it descends over the wide expanse of the fenlands. 

 Best heard then — and there : the darkening sky, the 

 wide and wind-swept waste of coarse tufted grass, 

 amongst which brown dock-stalks stand tall-ly and 

 thinly, the long, raised bank with its thin belt of 

 reeds beyond, emphasising rather than relieving the 

 flatness, the lonely thorn-bush, the stunted willow or 

 two, the black line of alders marking the course of 

 the sluggish river, the wind, the sad whispered music 

 in the grasses, the wilder music in the air, the alone- 

 ness, the drearness — such voices fit such scenes." 



The male and female snipe both bleat, but the 

 feathers in the tail which produce the sound are less 

 modified in the female, and the sound which they 

 produce is said to be different in consequence. That 

 there must be a difference would seem to follow of 



