A WOOD WREN AT WELLS 99 



writers on bird life have spoken of its song as if 

 they loved it. The ornithologists have in most 

 cases been satisfied to quote Gilbert White's 

 description in Letter XIX. : " This last haunts 

 only the tops of trees in high beechen woods, 

 and makes a sibilous grasshopper-like noise now 

 and then, at short intervals, shaking a little with 

 its wings when it sings." 



White was a little more appreciative in the 

 case of the willow wren when he spoke of its 

 "joyous, easy, laughing note;" yet the willow 

 wren has had to wait a long time to be recognised 

 as one of our best vocalists. Some years ago it 

 was greatly praised by John Burroughs, who 

 came over from America to hear the British 

 songsters, his thoughts running chiefly on the 

 nightingale, blackcap, throstle, and blackbird; and 

 he was astonished to find that this unfamed 

 warbler, about which the ornithologists had said 

 little and the poets nothing, was one of the most 

 delightful vocalists, and had a " delicious warble." 

 He waxed indignant at our neglect of such a 

 singer, and cried out that it had too fine a song 

 to please the British ear ; that a louder coarser 

 voice was needed to come up to John Bull's 



