20 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



rump white, and breast a vivid rufous paling to rusty 

 red in the autumn. The females and young are duller. 

 Stonechat and wheatear are birds of the waste, but 

 each lives in its own kingdom, the wheatear on sheep- 

 walks, downs and stony uplands, the stonechat in thick 

 scrub and on gorse and bramble-clumped commons. 

 On this coast the two kinds of country were often only 

 separated by a frontier turf wall, and though both species 

 perched upon the wall as common ground, they never 

 trespassed, unlike the internationalist linnet and meadow 

 pipit. 



The stonechat was so common in the land that, except 

 for the pipits and linnets, it outnumbered all the other 

 small birds, its double pebble-clapping call-notes — hwit- 

 jack, hwit-jack-jack — spurting into the air in every direction 

 I walked. Though not a social bird, it is his custom to 

 travel about in small family parties from the tips of 

 furze or bramble and over the highest fronds of the 

 bracken. Distinctive in habit and colouring as they are, 

 they wave their tails on their perches vertically like 

 wheatears, spring into the air and hover, a variegated 

 ball of colour in the sunlight, like pipits, plunge after 

 flying insects like fly-catchers, and flicker their wings on 

 alighting like hedge-sparrows. But these tricks of manner 

 are not plagiarisms or gobbets, being blended into the 

 whole musical phase of the stonechat's individuality. 

 They are motionless for about ten seconds to the minute 

 on their exposed perches, silhouetted like toy birds at 

 the extreme point of their bush or plant. A favourite 

 perching place was the top of foxglove stems with the 

 wide, slaty sea for a background. It was intriguing 

 to see these little Italian Comedy birds standing erect 

 against the huge, uniform canvas of the grey and furious 

 sea — ^poetic, but with a touch of the fantastic. Then 

 down among the long grasses or up in the air and back 

 upon their lighthouses, throwing out invisible rays of 

 what speculation we know not over the wilderness. 



In action, the stonechat is agile and sprightly, and 

 association is no doubt responsible for the legend that 

 he takes none too rosy a view of life. But there is no 

 call to be so anthropomorphic about him or libel the 



