WHICH bird-voice in Nature is the most expressive? Is it the ringdove’s happy crooning in the green depths of the woodland? or the nightingale’s solitary lamenting under the cold moon? Some might say the fierce, ringing cry of the Highlanders’ eagle among the clouds; others the soothing, homely clamour of the social rooks in the old Hampshire elms. Or is it some other? For myself, I think I would pass them all by, significant utterances though they are, like the cuckoo’s tell-tale note, the sparrow’s familiar chirp, the glad carol of the skylark, the placid vespers of the blackbird, and the joyous matins of the thrush; pass all these by, and many others, and choose—the cry of the corn-crake. Have you ever noticed that while you listen to the cuckoo calling, other birds seem to be silent? The cuckoo, for the time, is the only voice in the sky. So it is with the corn-crake. When you hear it, it is all alone. A short while ago the whitethroat was pouring out its little heart in an evening-song, and from the copse came the chuckle of the roosting pheasant. A night-jar had been purring over the golden furze that grows up from among the purple heather, and on the other side of the spinney an owl, on soft white lazy wing, had gone by crying to its mate. Queer little noises, “flung out of their holes” by rabbits, and others just as queer, but more inexplicable, from hedgerow and ditch, had told you that animal-life was on foot and a-wing, and as you sate on the stile, in the break of the high hedge, and saw the steam rising out of the clover, and the white moths, “ermine” and “ghost,” flash or flutter among the sweet bloom, it seemed as if everything was abroad, the day-things not yet asleep, the night-things already astir.

And all of a sudden the solitary corn-crake cries from the wheat. At once the whole air seems to hush: the very evening to listen. Crake-crake comes the cry, and there gathers over the scene an indescribable atmosphere of completest tranquillity. Crake-crake. Far away, somewhere in the dip beyond the rise, sounds a sheep-bell, and the chiding voice of the shepherd’s dog. But there is not a sound besides. Crake-crake. And the mist creeps up the corn-stalks, and covers the campions, and the air grows damp with dew. It is going to be another hot day to-morrow, just as it has been to-day. Crake-crake, cries the creeping rail, and

never a voice replies. And so homewards, up through the meadow, hummocked with hay-cocks, and rough to the feet with short grass-stubble, from which the sleepy skylarks spring at every step: up to the elms that shade the garden, and on to the lawn. The bats wheel overhead, their soft wings crumpling as they turn their somersaults, but never a voice in the air, save sharp needle-points of sound, as flittermouse calls to flittermouse. Only from among the wheat, now here, now there, comes up the cry of the rail, Crake-crake.

It is a charming bird, sufficiently rare to make the seeing of it an event to remember all the summer; the finding of its nest a triumph. And then to see the young ones!—little black imps that run like spiders. Once only in my life could I have shot one. I was out with my gun, “strolling round” for the unconsidering evening rabbit, when all of a sudden from under my feet, in the furrow that separated the turnips from a patch of lucerne, up got a bird, and its slow, clumsy flight told me that it was a corn-crake, and for the sake of its little black imps I lowered my gun and let the poor mother go.

But the corn-crake has done crying, or has wandered away into another field beyond hearing, and here in the garden the voices of Nature soon reassert themselves, and, resonant above the rest, the blackcap is singing

Whence comes this little musician? It may be from Persia or Abyssinia, or perhaps it has only stepped across, so to speak, from Norway. But here it is with its nest among the ivy and periwinkles on the bank, and its beautiful eggs, delicious little mottled ovals of jasper, complete in number in their cobweb cup. It is odd how few people, even those who are “fond of birds,” and have large gardens and grounds, know this little visitor by sight, or even by song. And yet it needs only a few minutes’ patience when once the blackcap is seen to watch it to its nest, and that once done it can be examined, as I have examined it, with a magnifying-glass at the end of a walking-stick, while it sits upon its eggs. Few birds are really more trustful in the places they may choose for their nests, or more courageous in remaining upon them when approached, than this pretty bird with the lovely voice.

Another bird seldom seen, or when seen recognised, is the turtle-dove. Its purring in the thicket is mistaken for the wood-pigeon’s by ears that are not on their guard for differences of note, and yet, if once recognised apart, the two can no more be confused than the rook’s and jackdaw’s. Of all birds I think it one of the stealthiest. Though building its nest where discovery seems almost certain for so large a fowl, it does its work with such secrecy that I doubt if any one in England ever saw a turtle-dove with a twig in its beak, or tracked it to its nest by its flight. I have found dozens of turtle-doves’ nests, but never one betrayed by the old birds. Yet the grasshopper warbler, supposed by most people to be one of the most subtle of nest-builders, and by its tiny size, its mouse-like habits, and its concealing colour, so carefully equipped by Nature for security, can be watched home to its nest, as I know from my own schoolboy days, with unerring certainty. It betrays itself in every action. You have only to “locate” the small ventriloquist’s cricket-voice and then lie down among the herbage and wait. From impatience the little birds are sure to show themselves, and if they are building they hop up and down, twist in and out of the lowest plants, with material for their nest in their beaks, and you have only to lie still and watch.

But “watching” all day long will do no good with turtle-doves. Whether building or not, they never tell you, and when they catch sight of you they fly off at once, as if they did not care where they flew to, or whether they ever came back there again. Let them go, but come back yourself later on to the same spot, approaching it, however, from the opposite direction. And if you flush them again, you may be sure that their nest will be, or is, thereabouts: midway, probably, between the two points of your approach. In a few days go back to find the nest, and if you walk backwards and forwards in the undergrowth, keeping your eyes upwards, so as to look through the bushes from underneath, you will find it, if it is there. For the hen-bird sits very close, and goes off her nest with a flap of the wings that is unmistakeable. Apart from this, if the bird is not at home, you may often find the nest by seeing the white eggs in it from underneath, the yolks of them showing against the sky a delicious pinky yellow. For the nest is a mere ghost of a nest—a skeleton—and can easily be imitated by taking a handful of thin birch and hazel twigs and sprinkling them at all angles in a heap. Such a nest a pair of birds may easily build in half an hour, and this, perhaps, is one reason why they are never seen at work. Why they should be content with such a skeleton of a nest or how so frail a network bears two bulky nestlings and their mother, is a mystery. But as Prior sings:

When they are on the wing, turtle-doves seem to like to keep below the level of the tree tops, and seldom, therefore,

come into sight conspicuously. But I have sate in an orchard and watched them, several together, flying about among the apple-trees, and feeding on the ground, when they were unconscious of my presence. Their flight is singularly beautiful and interesting, for the obstructions they meet with compel them to make the most graceful and sudden evolutions to avoid collision.

And I remember very well, how, as I sate there, looking up from my work every now and again at the wing-clapping and testily-cooing strangers, sporting and squabbling by turns, I heard, what I had never heard in that garden before—the tapping of a nuthatch.

Tracing up the small smith, I found it busy on the trunk of an old Scotch fir, where it found, if not ants, a colony of some other small insects, for it was picking them off right and left as they fled along the bark. This bird has discovered that if it raps upon a bough, the insects in the crevices are startled from their hiding-places by the jarring, and rush out, like human beings after an earthquake shock, into the open air, where the nuthatch soon disposes of them; and, unless I am mistaken, it is the only British bird that arrives at its food by a deliberate guile. All others, I think, catch their food by chancing to find it abroad, but the nuthatch accomplishes the effect by a reasonable cause, and frightens out of their chinks the creatures that it wishes to capture. Sometimes the insects only scuttle from one refuge into another, but the nuthatch rips the bark off in flakes and pursues the poor wretches from covert to covert.

It takes its name from another peculiarity, its fondness for nuts, beech-mast and acorns, which it fixes tight into some little crevice in the bark and hammers open. Looking at the shells of hazel-nuts that it has cracked, I believe that it first pecks a hole, and then getting its beak into it crosswise to the natural cleavage of the shell, splits the nut with a sharp rap on the bark. Its beak enters like a wedge and, while the two half-shells drop to the ground, one on either side, pierces and holds the kernel. It must take it out of its vice to split it, for while tightly gripped the bird could only pierce a hole in the nut and not cleave it, and this is evident if we put the two halves together, for we then see that though a hole was made, the shell did not split. The bird had to take it out of the cleft on its beak and knock it on the tree.

When nesting, it is not content with a hole that just suits it in size, but must needs choose a large hole and then plaster it up with mud till it becomes small enough. With the rest of the animal world the rule is to select what fits them at first, and failing this to enlarge the house to their needs. But the nuthatch has sense on its side, for it is easier to reduce than to increase, and which of us, if the sizes of houses made no difference in their rents, would not occupy by preference tenements with what auctioneers call “commanding approaches,” and “noble entrance halls,” even if we only used the back-door to come in and go out at? So the nuthatch picks out a big hole and then reduces it to its own dimensions, and the little nuthatches no doubt, when the tree-creepers happen to come by, speak boastfully of “the woodpecker’s house” that they live in, but never say that they keep the great front-doors shut and get in and out by the scullery-window.

Another little hole-nesting bird, an alien not often seen, is “the cuckoo’s mate,” the wryneck, a bird of very pretty plumage, mottled and barred, and yet curiously inconspicuous when clinging to a tree-trunk. Should you chance upon its nest it will twist its neck about in an extraordinary snake-like way and hiss, a procedure which in other countries may sometimes, perhaps, protect the small creature from capture, but in England, where tree-snakes are not common objects of the country, can hardly do the wryneck any good. At other times, too, it will pretend to be dead when you take it up, as the corn-crake will, but as soon as it sees a chance of escape it is off.

But when a bird is heard tapping in garden or orchard, it must not be taken for granted that the workman is either a nuthatch or a wryneck, for the “great tit,” the “oxeye” of many country places, has the same habit of fixing nuts or seeds in crevices and hammering at them with its bill till they split, and it will also search the bark of trees with its beak in quest of insects. But above all the birds of our English gardens, not excepting the sparrow (which, though an insolent is not a fearless bird) and the robin, the great tit confides in man and in all his doings.

I wrote once in a magazine an account of how I had caught the same great tit nine times in one afternoon, had nine times put it into an aviary, and nine times had found, on going to look for it, that it was gone. And a newspaper critic of my article suggested that I had been mistaken or something worse.

But a year later I found that I had Dr. GÜnther with me; for in an article written by him, now before me, he says that he has caught the same great tit over and over again, and that at last the bird, discovering that nothing disagreeable resulted, coolly went on eating while the trap snapped over him. My own experience was in the hard winter of 1892. I had put out a long row of traps, and visitors were very numerous. Among them came a great tit which was caught and put into the aviary, and to cut the story short, nine times a great tit was caught and nine times put into the aviary. But when in the afternoon we went to look at the captives, there was not a great tit among them all. Then the thought flashed upon me that we had been catching the same bird over and over again. Then we caught another great tit, and this time, before letting it go, we marked its tail, and sure enough the next great tit we caught had its tail marked. So instead of putting it into the aviary we fixed the trap open to let it eat its fill of chopped fat and hemp-seed without molestation.

How did it manage to get out? The mesh of the netting over the aviary was small enough to keep siskins inside, but the great tit, as we afterwards found, was not to be kept within the wires. It turns its body sideways, puts a wing through first and then its head and then squeezes the body out—exactly the same procedure, that is, reading arm instead of wing, as the professional child-burglar’s in India. If the great tit cannot get out of its prison, it commits suicide. For it thrusts itself so far through the wires or netting that it cannot move one way or the other, and is strangled.

Dr. GÜnther elsewhere gives an instance of fearlessness which is no doubt paralleled in animal history, but certainly never excelled, and for once I must break my rule and make a quotation in honour of the bird of Rowfant. So many vaguely authenticated stories are current that one, on such authority, is very valuable. “In the year 1888 a pair of great tits began to build in a post-box which stood in the road in the village of Rowfant, Sussex, and into which letters, etc. were posted and taken out of the door daily. One of the birds was killed by a boy, and the nest was not finished. However in the succeeding year, it appears, the survivor found another mate, and the pair completed the nest, filling nearly one half the box with moss and other nesting materials. Seven eggs were laid and incubated, but one day when an unusual number of post-cards were dropped into and nearly filled the box, the birds deserted the nest, which was afterwards removed with the eggs and preserved. In 1890 the pair built a new nest of about the same size as the previous one, laid again seven eggs, and reared a brood of five young, although the letters posted were often found lying on the back of the sitting bird, which never left the nest when the door was opened to take out the letters. The birds went in and out by the slit for the letters on the side of the box.”

Could anything be more charming, more touching, than this? and does any bird that breathes English air deserve more respect for its delightful confidence in man, more assistance in its times of stress and want, than the great tit? But it is not a bird that many people think of when they try to remember the lovable creatures that haunt their garden. For one thing, it is so restless that it seldom remains in sight more than an instant, and, as often as not, its crisp bright call is the only sign that we have of its presence as it flits to and fro after insects among the tree-tops, dropping suddenly on to the ground after a falling caterpillar, and as suddenly skipping up branch by branch to the height it had left. Whenever heard, even in the depth of winter, it is cheery, crying out with just as brisk and hearty a voice as when the summer sun was shining.