Brown lives next door but one to me. His speciality is birds, and he
must be a frightful nuisance to them. I shouldn't care to be a bird if
Brown knew where my nest was. It isn't that he takes their eggs. If he
would merely rob them and go away it wouldn't matter so much. They could
always begin again after a decent interval. But a naturalist of the
modern school doesn't want a bird's eggs; he wants to watch her sitting
on them. Now sitting is a business that demands concentration, a strong
effort of the will and an undistracted mind. How on earth is a bird to
concentrate when she knows perfectly well that Brown, disguised as a
tree or a sheep or a haycock, is watching her day after day for hours at
a stretch and snap-shotting her every five minutes or so for some
confounded magazine? In nine cases out of ten she lets her thoughts
wander and ends half unconsciously by posing, with the result that most
of her eggs don't hatch out.
Brown has a highly-trained sense of hearing. You and I, of course,
possess pretty good ears for ordinary purposes. We can catch as soon as
anyone else that muffled midnight hum, as of a distant threshing-machine
beneath a blanket, which advertises the approach of the roaming Zepp.
From constant practice, too, we have learnt, sitting in our drawing room
or study, to distinguish the crash of the overturned nursery table
upstairs from the duller, less resonant thud of baby's head as it
strikes the floor. But can we positively state from the note of the
blackbird at the bottom of the garden whether it has three, four or five
eggs in its nest, or indeed if it is a house-holder at all? No, we
cannot; but Brown can.
Even specialists, however, occasionally make mistakes. A day or two ago,
just as dusk was falling, Brown entered my house in a state of
considerable excitement and informed me that a pair of reed-warblers
were building in my orchard.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Quite," he replied. "I have not actually seen the birds yet, but I have
heard them from my own garden, and of course the note of the nesting
reed-warbler is unmistakable."
"Of course," I agreed.
"It is a most extraordinary occurrence," he continued, "most
extraordinary."
"You mean because there are no reeds there?"
"Exactly."
I was quite certain in my own mind that there were no reed-warblers
either, but I felt it would be impertinent for a layman like myself to
argue with Brown.
"There!" he exclaimed, darting to the open window. "Can't you hear it?"