THE STONECHAT.
IF you are walking in a district inhabited, however sparsely, by the stonechat, you cannot fail to see him, and if you see him, to recognize him. For he is a gaily painted little bird and does not shun the bright eye of day. His clothing is indeed as rich as the siskin's, yellow-hammer's, or goldfinch's—head and throat a velvety black, separated from the wings and mantle by a white collar, back also black marginated with chestnut, deep brown wings with a white patch on the coverts conspicuous in flight, a white rump, and breast a vivid rufous paling to rusty red in the autumn. The female and young are duller in colouring and without the brilliant contrasts of the male. Stonechat and wheatear are characteristic birds of the wastes, but each lives in its own kingdom : the wheatear on sheep-walks, downs, and stony uplands, the stonechat in thick scrub and on gorse and bramble-clumped commons. I have been in districts where the two kinds of country were contiguous, separated by a frontier turf wall ; and though both wheatear and stonechat perched upon the wall as common ground, they never trespassed into each other's territories, while the linnets and meadow pipits were quite international in their choice of country. Early in the spring an untidy nest of grass, rootlets, and moss is built under dense furze, and half a dozen eggs are laid of a greener blue than the whinchat's, zoned at one end with a sprinkling of chestnut spots. It is one of the most difficult nests to find, the intense uneasiness of the little parents acting as an efficient guard against self-betrayal.
Only in one place have I found the stonechat a common bird, and there it was so numerous that it outnumbered all other small birds except pipits and linnets, its double pebble-clapping call-note—Hwit-jack ! hwit-jack-jack !- chipping out in every direction one walked. This was a very unusual privilege, for the stonechat is not only more local in distribution than the whinchat, but being, unlike the latter, but a partial migrant, suffered a heavy mortality in the savage winter of 1916-17. In this favoured locality —wild, bleak, hedgeless and treeless for mile upon mile— I could study the stonechat as familiarly as though he were a robin. Though not a social bird, it is his custom to travel about in small family parties from the tips of furzes or brambles or over the highest fronds of the bracken. Even when undisturbed the birds are as active and restless, exposed on their topmost twigs, as the leaf-warblers among the branches. Distinctive in habit and colouring as they are, they borrow little tricks of manner from wheatear, pipit, flycatcher, and hedge-sparrow—like the first waving their tails on their perches vertically, like the second springing up into the air and hovering, like the third plunging after flying insects, and like the fourth flickering their wings on alighting. One might almost say, too, that they hover like a humming bird, remaining suspended as though on the crest of a fountain-jet twenty feet from the ground, a little ball of variegated colour in the sunlight. I have seen a bird thus hanging in the sky for a minute at a time and then dash down and chase his mate in wild doublings and gyrations round and among the brambles. But these borrowings are not plagiarisms or gobbets, but blended into the whole musical phrase of the stonechat's personality. On their exposed perches they are motion- less for about ten seconds in the minute, silhouetted -like toy birds at the extreme point of their bush or plant. A favourite perching-place is the top of foxglove stems and (as I saw them last autumn) with only the wide slaty sea for a background. It was very intriguing to see these little Italian comedy birds standing erect against the huge uniform canvas of the grey and furious sea— poetic, and with a touch of the fantastic, capricious, and plaintive about them. Then down among the long grasses or up in the air and back upon his lighthouse, throwing out tiny rays of what speculation we know not over the wilderness. ,For in spite of his paint, ho is of the element of waste and sea, as much as the curlew is, and, like him, the materialized symbol of wide, melancholy, and windy spaces.
In his actions the stonechat is an agile and sprightly bird, and it is probable that the legend which makes him. take none too rosy a view of life has risen through the associations of his habitat. " Thou," we say on beholding him, " whose exterior semblance doth belie " thy soul's care. But the stonechat is not a bit like the corn bunting, who does seem rather troubled at his own heaviness and clumsiness, and there is no call to be anthropomorphic about him or to libel the essential gladness which is in all Nature. What we can say, as we watch him flit, ever anxious and restless, from one plant-head to another, a minute Ahasuerus of the waste, is that unconsciously he seems to gather into his pretty body something of the brooding solitariness of his environment. But a more profitable reflection is born of the character and quality of his song. It is not true, as is commonly written in the books, that the stonechat stops singing at the end of June. I have heard it several times in September and constantly repeated even in rough weather. It is inaudible at any distance, without power and incapable of being sustained for more than a few notes. Yet it is one of the sweetest in the minor key of bird music, a silvery, low, and desultory warble, of an appealing softness and grace: There is a perceptible resemblance in it to the shrilling notes of the robin, those glitterin* sprays of sound, but it is very much more subdued and without any of their glowing and pene- trative melody. For it is an interesting fact that all the small birds which inhabit rough and stern desert places, smitten by the wind, have a peculiar delicacy and fragility of songvoices of porcelain. One notices it when one comes within the magic circle of a linnet choir when the birds come pelting down upon the bushes and burst into peals of elfin music as airy as cloudlets in a calm evening sky. Wheatear, whinchat, rock and meadow pipit—their singing has a kind of pearly lustre, the wood birds' songs being coarser and louder in tone. Among the larger birds the contrast is achieved more on the plane of colour—the luminous whiteness of herring gulls, the roseate breast of one species of terns, the delicate pencillings of the plumage of curlew, whimbrel, and the smaller wading birds. We might well call the liquid song of the stonechat, uttered in spring when hovering m the air, but in autumn more frequently from a perch, an aesthetic device on the part of the most fertile of artists and, in the notation of sound, similar to the harmonious combinations of pied plumage and pink legs in the oyster-catcher and black cost and coral bill in the though. The frailty of tho song accentuates the harshness of the stonechat's surroundings,
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