The Foraging Crow
Continually Turns His Head, Gull-Like And Harrier-Like, From
Side To Side, As If To Search The Ground Thoroughly Or To
Concentrate His Vision On Some Vaguely Seen Object.
Not only the crow was there:
A magpie chattered as I came from
the brake, but refused to show himself; and a little later a
jay screamed at me, as only a jay can. There are times when I
am intensely in sympathy with the feeling expressed in this
ear-splitting sound, inarticulate but human. It is at the
same time warning and execration, the startled solitary's
outburst of uncontrolled rage at the abhorred sight of a
fellow-being in his woodland haunt.
Small birds were numerous at that spot, as if for them also
its wildness and infertility had an attraction. Tits,
warblers, pipits, finches, all were busy ranging from place to
place, emitting their various notes now from the tree-tops,
then from near the ground; now close at hand, then far off;
each change in the height, distance, and position of the
singer giving the sound a different character, so that the
effect produced was one of infinite variety. Only the
yellow-hammer remained constant in one spot, in one position,
and the song at each repetition was the same. Nevertheless
this bird is not so monotonous a singer as he is reputed. A
lover of open places, of commons and waste lands, with a bush
or dwarf tree for tower to sit upon, he is yet one of the most
common species in the thickly timbered country of the Otter,
Clyst, and Sid, in which I had been rambling, hearing him
every day and all day long.
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