28 BIEBS AND MAN 



of the night-jar and the startling scream of the 

 woodland jay, the deep human-like tones of the 

 raven, the inflected wild cry of the curlew, and 

 the beautiful wild whistle of the widgeon, heard 

 in the silence of the night on some lonely mere. 



The reason is that these, and numberless 

 more, are the sounds of the bird life of their 

 own home and country ; the living voices to 

 which they listened when they were y^ung and 

 the senses keener than now, and their enthusiasm 

 greater ; they were in fact heard with an emotion 

 which the foreign species never inspired in them, 

 and thus heard, the images of the sounds were 

 made imperishable. 



In my case the foreign were the home birds, 

 and on that account alone more to me than all 

 others ; yet I escaped that prejudice which the 

 British naturalist is never wholly without — the 

 notion that the home bird is, intrinsically, better 

 worth listening to than the bird abroad; Finally, 

 on coming to this country, I could not listen to 

 the birds coldly, as an English naturalist would 

 to those of, let us say, Queensland, or Burma, 

 or Canada, or Patagonia, but with an intense 

 interest ; for these were the birds which my 



