Heralds Spring has of course many heralds of different sorts.
For example, almost on the same day the first emigrant birds, three or four chiff-chaffs, chattered away in the elms of my paddock (to disappear the next day); a rabbit was watched carrying grass for its nest ; and two very affec- tionate partridges trotted across the lawn. The songs of thrush and robin are no evidence of spring. They have been heard as usual throughout the winter ; but the blackbird is in a different class. This year he was singing earlier than I remember to have heard him; and the quality of his notes has no parallel at all, unless it is in the spring call of the curlew; and the curlew cannot, like the blackbird, sing a tune. We delight in the "charm of birds," that is the song of birds for their own peculiar beauty, but a certain likeness to our own musical tunes adds a particular attraction to the blackbird's song. They seem to sing more than they used to and to nest earlier, perhaps, because of their numbers. Has any other bird so patently multiplied in recent years ? The thrushes have not yet quite recovered from past hard winters, but the blackbird is much hardier than the thrush as, in the same genus, the fieldfare than the redwing or, may one say, the golden than the green plover?
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