120 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



of storm ; the larks in flocks on the allotments utter 

 their strident, grating alarm cry ; the starlings are 

 a Parliament of Foules, composed wholly of their 

 own party ; the wren gives us his sweet, running, 

 precise phrase — and so on. Everywhere the winter 

 hums with talk, friends' talk and business talk both, 

 and all at once the blackbird chimes in with the tran- 

 sition from the workaday world to the ideal one. 

 Secondly, the blackbird's rich contralto has a reflec- 

 tive and even melancholy-seeming cast more in touch 

 with human emotion to-day than the throstle's effer- 

 vescence. As I lay and listened to him it seemed 

 impossible that I should soon get up, eat porridge and 

 read of the villanies men do to one another. 



Within two yards of me in the garden I have the 

 robin singing " inwardly," as Gilbert White would 

 say. This subdued and delicate warbling is quite 

 different from the usual song, or the tet tet of indigna- 

 tion, or the sobbing gasp uttered when the nest is 

 approached. It is so faint as to be unheard ten 

 yards away, and rather like a series of vocal sighs 

 crept into melody — ^airy bubbles of sound, a song in 

 music what pearl is in colour — how can one describe 

 it ? The great tit's spring song I first heard on 

 January 28th, in 1919, and the blue-tit's as early as 

 December 1920. The former is a high and low note, 

 loudly and rapidly repeated, sometimes twenty times, 

 somewhat metallic, and uttered with a jovial, conse- 

 quential air admirably suited to so virile a character. 

 Blue-tit's welcome to the season is only a single note, 

 likewise volleyed out in quicker sequence still, and 

 with a prelude of three notes, with longer intervals 

 between them, but it is much purer and sweeter in 

 quality than the oxeye's song. By April the dunnock 

 is singing all day long, and will so continue for 

 months. In the wonderfully mild winter of 1919-20, 

 indeed, he sang regularly from October to March. 

 A sentiment clings to this temperately gay song, 

 which finds its way even into books of the ornithologists 

 of the collecting sort, as they industriously cart into 

 them their rubble of tedious facts compiled at the expense 



