Throughout That District, Where
The Fields Are Small, And The Trees Big And Near Together, He
Has The Cirl-Bunting's Habit Of Perching To Sing On The Tops
Of High Hedgerow Elms And Oaks.
By and by I had a better bird to listen to - a redstart.
A
female flew down within fifteen yards of me; her mate followed
and perched on a dry twig, where he remained a long time for
so shy and restless a creature. He was in perfect plumage,
and sitting there, motionless in the strong sunlight, was
wonderfully conspicuous, the gayest, most exotic-looking bird
of his family in England. Quitting his perch, he flew up into
a tree close by and began singing; and for half an hour
thereafter I continued intently listening to his brief strain,
repeated at short intervals - a song which I think has never
been perfectly described. "Practice makes perfect" is an
axiom that does not apply to the art of song in the bird
world; since the redstart, a member of a highly melodious
family, with a good voice to start with, has never attained to
excellence in spite of much practising. The song is
interesting both on account of its exceptional inferiority and
of its character. A distinguished ornithologist has said that
little birds have two ways of making themselves attractive - by
melody and by bright plumage; and that most species excel in
one or the other way; and that the acquisition of gay colours
by a species of a sober-coloured melodious family will cause
it to degenerate as a songster. He is speaking of the
redstart. Unfortunately for the rule there are too many
exceptions. Thus confining ourselves to a single family - that
of the finches - in our own islands, the most modest coloured
have the least melody, while those that have the gayest
plumage are the best singers - the goldfinch, chaffinch,
siskin, and linnet. Nevertheless it is impossible to listen
for any length of time to the redstart, and to many redstarts,
without feeling, almost with irritation, that its strain is
only the prelude of a song - a promise never performed; that
once upon a time in the remote past it was a sweet, copious,
and varied singer, and that only a fragment of its melody now
remains. The opening rapidly warbled notes are so charming
that the attention is instantly attracted by them. They are
composed of two sounds, both beautiful - the bright pure
gushing robin-like note, and the more tender expressive
swallow-like note. And that is all; the song scarcely begins
before it ends, or collapses; for in most cases the pure sweet
opening strain is followed by a curious little farrago of
gurgling and squeaking sounds, and little fragments of varied
notes, often so low as to be audible only at a few yards'
distance. It is curious that these slight fragments of notes
at the end vary in different individuals, in strength and
character and in number, from a single faintest squeal to half
a dozen or a dozen distinct sounds. In all cases they are
emitted with apparent effort, as if the bird strained its pipe
in the vain attempt to continue the song.
The statement that the redstart is a mimic is to be met with
in many books about birds. I rather think that in jerking out
these various little broken notes which end its strain,
whether he only squeaks or succeeds in producing a pure sound,
he is striving to recover his own lost song rather than to
imitate the songs of other birds.
So much entertainment did I find at that spot, so grateful did
it seem in its openness after long confinement in the lower
thickly wooded country, that I practically spent the day
there. At all events the best time for walking was gone when
I quitted it, and then I could think of no better plan than to
climb down into the old long untrodden road, or channel, again
just to see where it would lead me. After all, I said, my
time is my own, and to abandon the old way I have walked in so
long without discovering the end would be a mistake. So I
went on in it once more, and in about twenty minutes it came
to an end before a group of old farm buildings in a hollow in
the woods. The space occupied by the buildings was quite
walled round and shut in by a dense growth of trees and
bushes; and there was no soul there and no domestic animal.
The place had apparently been vacant many years, and the
buildings were in a ruinous condition, with the roofs falling
in.
Now when I look back on that walk I blame myself for having
gone on my way without trying to find out something of the
history of that forsaken home to which the lonely old road had
led me. Those ruinous buildings once inhabited, so wrapped
round and hidden away by trees, have now a strange look in
memory as if they had a story to tell, as if something
intelligent had looked from the vacant windows as I stood
staring at them and had said, We have waited these many years
for you to come and listen to our story and you are come at
last.
Something perhaps stirred in me in response to that greeting
and message, but I failed to understand it, and after standing
there awhile, oppressed by a sense of loneliness, I turned
aside, and creeping and pushing through a mass and tangle of
vegetation went on my way towards the coast.
Possibly that idea or fancy of a story to tell, a human
tragedy, came to me only because of another singular
experience I had that day when the afternoon sun had grown
oppressively hot - another mystery of a desolate but not in
this case uninhabited house. The two places somehow became
associated together in my mind.
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