The Warblers: The Grey Warbler 
53 
tore, the skin of its throat and neck dilating and throbbing, 
and its tail quivering as it trills out its gentle plaintive 
melody; or it will sing whilst moving about briskly here and 
there, now erect, now suspended upside down, never ceasing 
its melody unless interrupted for a moment by the capture of 
an insect. The usual trilling song may best be reproduced on 
a violin, but there is another indeterminate song of quite a 
different quality, its sound being rather that of a cheerful 
whistle. 
The phrase (7) was repeated six or eight times by a warbler 
sitting close by, and within sight, and each set of six notes and 
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rest taking about a second. The repeated phrase was followed 
by the ordinary song, and the quality of the two was different 
both in timbre and in utterance. The whistled phrase (7) is 
cheery and bright; the ordinary song is subdued and melan¬ 
choly, and slightly ventriloquous; so that the two songs, though 
sung by the same bird, appeared to come from different places, 
the ordinary song from a place further removed. The first 
note of the six is more softly uttered, so that at a distance 
there would be heard only five notes, or an odd number, as 
in (8). The latter (8) was recorded two years before I saw 
the bird and was able to identify the singer. The ordinary 
song is often opened with notes like the fantail’s tweet-tweet, 
tweet, or tweet-a-tweet, or tweet-a-tweet-tweet, and it may also 
be opened with quiet little chuckling guggle of notes, as (9), 
much softer than the song, repeated in two or three sets of 
three. Even when uttered within two arms’ length of the 
listener these guggling notes sounded extremely faint and 
subdued, and it is certain that a great deal of beautiful bird¬ 
song is never heard at all by human beings. 
