The foregoing chapter was written previous to my last visit to England,
and when my knowledge of the British song-birds was mainly from report,
and not from personal observation. I had heard the skylark, and briefly
the robin, and snatches of a few other bird strains, while in that
country in the autumn of 1871; but of the full spring and summer chorus,
and the merits of the individual songsters, I knew little except through
such writers as White, Broderip, and Barrington. Hence, when I found
myself upon British soil once more, and the birds in the height of their
May jubilee, I improved my opportunities, and had very soon traced every
note home. It is not a long and difficult lesson; there is not a great
variety of birds, and they do not hide in woods and remote corners. You
find them nearly all wherever your walk leads you. And how they do sing!
how loud and piercing their notes are! Not a little of the pleasure I
felt arose from the fact that the birds sang much as I expected them to,
much as they ought to have sung according to my previous views of their
merits and qualities, when contrasted with our own songsters.
I shall not soon forget how my ears were beset that bright May morning,
two days after my arrival at Glasgow, when I walked from Ayr to Alloway,
a course of three miles in one of the most charming and fertile rural
districts in Scotland. It was as warm as mid-June, and the country had
the most leafy and luxuriant June aspect. Above a broad stretch of
undulating meadow-land on my right the larks were in full song. These I
knew; these I welcomed. What a sound up there, as if the sunshine were
vocal! A little farther along, in a clover field, I heard my first
corn-crake. "Crex, crex, crex," came the harsh note out of the grass,
like the rasping sound of some large insect, and I knew the bird at
once. But when I came to a beautiful grove or wood, jealously guarded by
a wall twelve feet high (some fine house concealed back there, I saw by
the entrance), what a throng of strange songs and calls beset my ears!
The concert was at its height. The wood fairly rang and reverberated
with bird-voices. How loud, how vivacious, almost clamorous, they
sounded to me! I paused in delightful bewilderment.
Two or three species of birds, as I afterwards found, were probably
making all the music I heard, and of these, one species was contributing
at least two thirds of it. At Alloway I tarried nearly a week, putting
up at a neat little inn
"Where Doon rins, wimplin', clear,"
and I was not long in analyzing this spirited bird-choir, and tracing
each note home to its proper source. It was, indeed, a burst of song,
as the Duke of Argyll had said, but the principal singer his grace does
not mention. Indeed, nothing I had read, or could find in the few
popular treatises on British ornithology I carried about with me, had
given me any inkling of which was the most abundant and vociferous
English song-bird, any more than what I had read or heard had given me
any idea of which was the most striking and conspicuous wild flower, or
which the most universal weed. Now the most abundant song-bird in
Britain is the chaffinch, the most conspicuous wild flower (at least in
those parts of the country I saw) is the foxglove, and the most
ubiquitous weed is the nettle. Throughout the month of May, and probably
during all the spring months, the chaffinch makes two thirds of the
music that ordinarily greets the ear as one walks or drives about the
country. In both England and Scotland, in my walks up to the time of my
departure, the last of July, I seemed to see three chaffinches to one of
any other species of bird. It is a permanent resident in this island,
and in winter appears in immense flocks. The male is the prettiest of
British song-birds, with its soft blue-gray back, barred wings, and pink
breast and sides. The Scotch call it shilfa. At Alloway there was a
shilfa for every tree, and its hurried and incessant notes met and
intersected each other from all directions every moment of the day, like
wavelets on a summer pool. So many birds, and each one so persistent and
vociferous, accounts for their part in the choir. The song is as loud
as that of our orchard starling, and is even more animated. It begins
with a rapid, wren-like trill, which quickly becomes a sharp jingle,
then slides into a warble, and ends with an abrupt flourish. I have
never heard a song that began so liltingly end with such a quick, abrupt
emphasis. The last note often sounds like "whittier," uttered with great
sharpness; but one that used to sing in an apple-tree over my head, day
after day there by the Doon, finished its strain each time with the
sharp ejaculation, "Sister, right here." Afterwards, whenever I met a
shilfa, I could hear in its concluding note this pointed and almost
impatient exclamation of "Sister, right here." The song, on the whole,
is a pleasing one, and very characteristic; so rapid, incessant, and
loud. The bird seemed to be held in much less esteem in Britain than on
the Continent, where it is much sought after as a caged bird. In
Germany, in the forest of Thuringia, the bird is in such quest that
scarcely can one be heard. A common workman has been known to give his
cow for a favorite songster. The chaffinch has far less melody and charm
of song than some of our finches, notably our purple finch; but it is so
abundant and so persistent in song that in quantity of music it far
excels any singer we have.
Next to the chaffinch in the volume of its song, and perhaps in some
localities surpassing it, is the song-thrush. I did not find this bird
upon the Doon, and but rarely in other places in Scotland, but in the
south of England it leads the choir. Its voice can be heard above all
others. But one would never suspect it to be a thrush. It has none of
the flute-like melody and serene, devotional quality of our thrush
strains. It is a shrill whistling polyglot. Its song is much after the
manner of that of our brown thrasher, made up of vocal attitudes and
poses. It is easy to translate its strain into various words or short
ejaculatory sentences. It sings till the darkness begins to deepen, and
I could fancy what the young couple walking in the gloaming would hear
from the trees overhead. "Kiss her, kiss her; do it, do it; be quick, be
quick; stick her to it, stick her to it; that was neat, that was neat;
that will do," with many other calls not so explicit, and that might
sometimes be construed as approving nods or winks. Sometimes it has a
staccato whistle. Its performance is always animated, loud, and clear,
but never, to my ear, melodious, as the poets so often have it. Even
Burns says,--
"The mavis mild and mellow."