ENGLISH SONG BIRDS 
615 
tiful singers they were. Blackbirds were 
very abundant, and they played a promi¬ 
nent part in the chorus which we heard 
throughout the day on every hand, though 
perhaps loudest the following morning at 
dawn. In its habits and manners, the 
blackbird strikingly resembles our Amer¬ 
ican robin, and indeed looks exactly like 
a robin, with a yellow bill and coal-black 
plumage. It hops everywhere over the 
lawns, just as our robin does, and it lives 
in nests in the gardens in the same fash¬ 
ion. Its song has a general resemblance 
to that of our robin, but many of the 
notes are far more musical, more like 
those of our wood thrush. Indeed there 
were individuals among those we heard cer¬ 
tain of whose notes seemed to me almiost 
to equal in point of melody the chimes of 
the wood thrush ; and the highest possible 
praise for any song bird is to liken its song 
to that of the wood thrush or hermit 
thrush. I certainly do not think that the 
blackbird has received full justice in the 
books. I knew that he was a singer, but 
I really had no idea how fine a singer he 
was. I suppose one of his troubles has 
been his name, just as with our own cat 
bird. When he appears in the ballads as 
the merle, bracketed with his cousin the 
mavis, the song thrush, it is far easier to 
recognize him as the master singer that 
he is. It is a fine thing for England to 
have such an asset of the countryside, a 
bird so common, so much in evidence, so 
fearless, and such a really beautiful singer. 
The thrush is a fine singer too, a better 
singer than our American robin, but to 
my mind not at the best quite as good 
as the blackbird at his best; although often 
I found difficulty in telling the song of 
one from the song of the other, especially 
if I only heard two or three notes. 
The larks were, of course, exceedingly 
attractive. It was fascinating to see them 
spring from the grass, circle upwards, 
steadily singing, and soaring for several 
minutes, and then return to the point 
whence they had started. As my com¬ 
panion pointed out, they exactly fulfilled 
Wordsworth’s description : they soared but 
did not roam. It is quite impossible 
wholly to differentiate a bird’s voice from 
its habits and surroundings. Although in 
the lark song there are occasional musical 
notes, the song as a whole is not very 
musical, but it is so joyous, buoyant and 
unbroken, and uttered under such condi¬ 
tions as fully to entitle the bird to the 
place he occupies with both poet and 
prose writer. 
The most musical singer we heard was 
the black cap warbler. To my ear its 
song seemed more musical than that ol 
the nightingale. It was astonishingly 
powerful for so small a bird ; in volume 
and continuity it does not come up to the 
songs of the thrushes and of certain other 
birds, but in quality, as an isolated bit of 
melody, it can hardly be surpassed. 
Among the minor singers the robin 
was noticeable. We all know this pretty 
little bird from the books, and I was pre¬ 
pared to find Tim as friendly and attract¬ 
ive as he proved to be, but I had not 
realized how well he sang. It is not a 
loud song, but very musical and attract¬ 
ive, and the bird is said to sing practically 
all through the year. The song of the 
wren interested me much, because it was 
not in the least like that of our house 
wren, but, on the contrary, like that of 
our winter wren. The theme is the same 
as the winter wren’s, but the song did 
not seem to me to be as brilliantly musical 
as that of the tiny singer of the north 
woods. The sedge warbler sang in the 
thick reeds a mocking ventriloquial lay, 
which reminded me at times of the less 
pronounced parts of our yellow breasted 
chat’s song. The cuckoo’s cry was sin¬ 
gularly attractive and musical, far more 
so than the rolling, many times repeated, 
note of our rain-crow. 
We did not reach the inn at Brocken- 
hurst until about nine o’clock, just at night¬ 
fall, and a few minutes before that we 
heard a nightjar. It did not sound in the 
least like either our whippoorwill or our 
night hawk, uttering a long-continued call 
of one or two syllables, repeated over and 
over. The chaffinch was very much in 
evidence, continually chaunting its unim¬ 
portant little ditty. I was pleased to see 
the bold, masterful missel thrush, the 
storm cock as it is often called; but this 
bird breeds and sings in the early spring, 
when the weather is still tempestuous, 
and had long been silent when we saw it. 
The starlings, rooks, and jackdaws did 
not sing, and their calls were attractive 
merely as the calls of our grakles are 
