BIRDS AND THEIR SINGING.
THE study of the language of birds is a somewhat neglected branch of country lore, and the majority of ornithologists have trained the eye to far more acute obser- vation than the ear. Not only does this lead to mistake; and to the overlooking of interesting and important facts, but in consequence of it many naturalists have a one-sided and in- complete impression of the personality of the birds. For birds show a great deal of character in their singing. Voice and tune and the whole manner of delivery are usually very distinctive, and until the naturalist is familiar with them he cannot be said really to know his birds.
Among our British birds, to go no further afield, there is to be found every grade of vocal accomplishment. A few water- birds are practically voiceless ; many shorebirds and hawks have one call-note that does duty, with slight modification for mood and season, for all converse with their kind; and so on we could trace a series up to the more modest songsters,' and from them to those finer songsters that are more especially "the poet's birds." This gradual advance is brought about not by the substitution of music for the cruder call-note, but by the addition of the more musical notes ; for not only does the song-bird retain its call-notes, but it gains as well between its call-notes and its song a large vocabulary of most expressive language. There is often a strong family likeness in voice among the members of any particular group of birds. Striking examples of this family likeness are to be found in the -piping or whistling notes of the waders and the wailing cries of the gulls; and of the singing birds probably no better example could be chosen than the thrush family. Modern ornithology has placed the thrushes at the head of tbe list of birds, regarding them and their relations as the highest of all in organisation; and one of their chief points of supremacy is in their power of song. The three best-known members of the thrush family that breed and sing with us in England are the common song-thrush, its larger oousin, the missel-thrush, and the blackbird ; and all of these are noted and prized for their song. The family resemblance In their voice and manner of singing is very marked ; all of them have loud, clear, and flute-like voices, and they love to sing from a commanding position, generally the top of one of the highest trees. But they have their differences as well. The song-thrush is the least polished performer of the three. If you are close enough you will hear that he intersperses many harsh and squeaky notes among the flute-like ones; but his song stands altogether un- rivalled as an expression of hearty open-air happiness. The missel-thrush is a larger and more courageous bird, and his disposition Comes out in his singing. He has no harsh notes, and his voice is strikingly clear and liquid; his song, for the most part, is made up of a number of phrases, repeated and not very varied, but he has a curious way of keeping his voice up without a drop on the last note,—a way that compels your attention and makes you listen for the next phrase. However it may be brought about, the main character of the missel-thrush's song is the wild ring of freedom that seems to pulse through it; it fits in exactly with the bird's habit of singing in wild, stormy weather; such as lowers the enthusiasm of other birds below the singing point, and it is this habit that'has gained for him the name of " stormcook " among the country folk. But of this trio the real artist in song is the blackbird. It is not only that his voice is wonderfully rich and mellow; his delivery is so eminently artistic. He allows his song to fall from him, as it were, in detached strains full of exquisite melody and seemingly full of thoughtfulness and feeling. Several blackbirds singing together produce what is probably the finest bird-chorus on the earth, and this is partly owing to their intermittent style of song; they do not interrupt or interfere with one another much. The blackbird is at his best in the evening, for his mellow fragments of song seem to be speaking of the rest and quiet- ness of the closing day; and the chorus that you will Thear on the outskirts of a wood in the summer twilight must stir your emotions as much as it charms your ear.
Every one has noticed how silent the woods are in winter. Travellers tells us of the year-round lonely _silence of tropical forests ; but our smaller woodlands in England have a Beason of life and activity, and especially in the early summer months they are full of song and the flitting to and fro of small birds amongst the underwood. Our own stay-at-home birds, the thrushes and chaffinches, .robins and wrens, are responsible for some of this added life and bustle, but the great difference is due to the little summer migrants of the warbler, tribe. They come trooping in all through the few rapid weeks of real spring-time, and almost before you can realise that the change is due the woods are filled with a lively population, and ringing with song to a degree that would seem wonderful beyond belief after the long stillness of the winter if you had not learnt to expect it. For the warblers are worthy of their name They are pre-eminently Nature's instruments of song. No other birds seem so to love their singing and to weave it so intimately and so can- tinuously into all their life and doings of the summer-time. -We-find, as we should expect in such a large group, a great variety of gifts and great differences in the voice and manner Of their song; in fact there is no group that shows less of that family likeness that is so Strong among the thrushes. For example, the chiffchaff and willow wren are very typical warblers, and are almost identical in form and plumage, yet the contrast in their notes is striking : the- chiffchaffs, a clear, ringing call, like the dripping of 'water- into a magic 'well; the willow wren's, a gentle little Bong. a simple running down the scale, but really moving in its plaintiveness - and pathos when you hear it first in the spring., On the other hand, there are two songs, those of the blackcap and garden warbler, so much alike that many people find it hard to distinguish them ; both are liquid and flute-like, and very similar in general style, but the blackcap's, though the more brilliant of the two, is a "set piece" that you get to know in time; whilst the garden warbler's is more sustained and modulated, and at the same time original and varied in tune. Of a totally different type, again, is the lively but jerky and scrambled song of the whitethroat ; and the irrepressible sedge warbler carries the same style to its consummation in a headlong gabble of notes of every kind, working up from a harsh chatter to a wild con- fusion of sounds, a quick, unhesitating torrent of scraps that might have been snatched from half the bird-songs of the land. Of yet another and a quite unique type, are the songs of the wood wren and grasshopper warbler; they are distinct enough from one another, but they agree in that they both consist of a sequence of strange ticking notes, more like the call of an insect than a bird. And if there are wide differences in voice among the warblers, the differences in manner are just as strong. The chiffchaff and willow wren utter their song while they are gliding about among the twigs, and scarcely make a pause for it; in fact, though you are watch- ing the very bird that is singing, you are frequently in doubt whether the voice comes from that or another bird, unless you are near enough to see the pulsing and vibration of the delicate little frame as the song breaks from it. The blackcap and garden warbler have the same desultory way between their songs, but they always pause at the moment of singing and throw their heart into it. The grasshopper warbler, on the contrary, takes his singing very seriously; when he does begin it he usually makes a bout of it, often placing himself on the topmost twig of a bush and reeling off his curious strain with no long intervals for an hour together. The wood wren, too, is nearly as persistent and even more absorbed, for he quivers his half-opened wings and turns round and round on his perch to give force to his delivery, a performance that to us seems in rather humorous contrast with the unbirdlike sounds that are the sole result of it all. But for perfect abandonment the whitethroat takes the palm. His custom is to launch himself from the hedgerow and pour out his zigzag song through an equally zigzag and tipsy course in the air, finishing with a dive back into the hedge again; he often sings as well without leaving the hedge, but always with the utmost animation of posture and action.
There are others of the warblers that are less well known, though all are dear to the lover of the country. Dear to him also for their song are many of the finches, the buntings, and the titlarks, and these again show a wide range of style and delivery. Then there is the little brown wren, the "jenny wren" of the country people, the restless, bob-tailed embodi- ment of unfailing good spirits, with that ringing song of such astonishing power and volume that is heard at its very best when the snow lies thick and the land is stilled in the grip of the frost.
By general consent the title of "the poet's bird" belongs to the nightingale. Coming as it does midway between the two greatest tribes of songsters, the thrushes and the warblers, and combining all the best qualities of both in its single throat, the nightingale seems inevitably marked out as the master- singer. Yet even when we take into account all the possibilities of its lineage and connections, the powers of the nightingale are wonderful in the highest degree. In melody and grace it can surpass the blackbird, it has a brilliance far greater than the blackcap's, and even the garden warbler is very far behind it in modulation and originality; whilst it has an eloquence and an apparent design in its singing that are barely hinted at in the song of any other bird. And yet there is one other bird that is surely more essentially the bird of poetry. The skylark lacks some of the elements of romance that help to bring the nightingale into notice, and its very commonness tends to blind us to its rare qualities. But he who cultivates the habit of trying now and then to see the common things of life as though he were looking on them for
the first time has a vast field of wonder opened to him ; and he will meet with little more full of miracle than the sudden syringing of this bird up from the field with its whole being absorbed in song and in gaining the broad, light-filled space of heaven. It is the very bodying forth of the idea of prayer, and the music of the song as it streams down from the sky seems the purest, the most artless and wholesome expression of a wealth of feelings of at once the loftiest and the most homely kind. For when the lark has climbed, singing cease- lessly, till the eye all but loses him, his is no song of exulta- tion in his escape to a fairer element ; a softened tone of gentle restraint runs through it, as if up there in the sky he is still thinking of the meadows beneath him, and the well. known details of their flowers and blades of grass. It is hard to believe that we are merely reading into the skylark our own thoughts in watching him. It is hard to believe that this miracle could have arisen save as the outcome of some deep feeling in the heart of Nature that must find utterance. Yet, however it may arise, and whatever it may mean, it is none the less a miracle, and it can be fitly described only by the deeper insight and the richer language of the poet; and the poet's bird the skylark must ever he.
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