182 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



But the commoner tirds can give us as many precious 

 moments of choiceness and distinction as those less 

 famihar and striking can do, since we have more 

 opportunities of getting them. In a small grove of 

 firs, in that same beech-wood where the tawny owl 

 displayed his parts, I fell in with a party of cole-tits 

 hanging to the terminal twigs of a beech. I looked 

 through the dark sage-green of the firs up at their 

 minute black pates and white cheeks set in the palest 

 apple green, with a thin coating of chequered blue above, 

 and for the moment I wondered whether earth had any- 

 thing to show more fair. In the wood where I got 

 on terms with the blackcap I once saw half a dozen 

 cole-tits ascending and probing the bark of a birch 

 with the same action as a creeper, except that they 

 used their wings to flutter upwards. These illustrious 

 pioneers were not so beautiful as the beechwood party, 

 but more suggestive, richer in promise, and so quaint, 

 halt, and yet aspiring in their motions, that they re- 

 minded me of the cuts in old emblem-books, where the 

 soul wings its way painfully to heaven with a large 

 iron weight attached to its extremities. Yet was this 

 or the other a more revealing thing to see than that far 

 more characteristic one — a procession of tits passing 

 in a hubbub of talk through the leafless trees on a grey 

 winter's day ? For birds face their heroic struggle with 

 the elements not by competition but co-operation, 

 standing foursquare to the winds that blow. 



II 



The best of throstle and chaffinch is not, I think, 

 in their songs, though at dusk and some distance off 

 the former's sensuous melody is very beautiful. I 

 prefer his soft olive and brown, his attitudes and 

 abrupt, dashing runs on the turf. Above all, the sitting 

 hen-bird's mingling of tenacious, desperate courage in 

 sticking to her nest and appeal from liquid eyes to 

 the intruder have always been more to me than the 

 song, unless I have heard it in more favourable cir- 

 cumstances than usual. Complexity of emotion and 



